Tamil (
தமிழ்) is a
Dravidian language spoken predominantly by
Tamil people of the
Indian subcontinent. It has
official status in the
Indian state of
Tamil Nadu and in the
Indian union territory of
Puducherry. Tamil is also an official language of
Sri Lanka and
Singapore. It is one of the 22
scheduled languages of India and the first Indian language to be declared as a
classical language by the
government of India in 2004. Tamil is also spoken by significant minorities in
Malaysia and
Mauritius as well as emigrant communities around the world.
Tamil is one of the longest surviving classical languages in India.
Tamil literature has existed for over two thousand years.
The earliest
epigraphic records found on rock edicts and
hero stones date from around the 3rd century
BCE.
The earliest period of Tamil literature,
Sangam literature, is dated from the 300 BCE – 300 CE.
Tamil language inscriptions written c. 1st century BCE and 2nd century CE have been discovered in Egypt, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
The two earliest manuscripts from India,
to be acknowledged and registered by
UNESCO Memory of the World register in 1997 and 2005 were in Tamil.
More than 55% of the epigraphical inscriptions (about 55,000) found by the
Archaeological Survey of India are in the Tamil language.
According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.
It has the oldest extant
literature amongst other
Dravidian languages.
The variety and quality of classical Tamil literature has led to its being described as "one of the great classical traditions and literatures of the world".
Classification
Tamil belongs to the
southern branch of the
Dravidian languages, a family of around 26 languages native to the
Indian subcontinent.
It is also classified as being part of a
Tamil language family, which alongside Tamil proper, also includes the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groups
such as the
Irula, and
Yerukula languages (see
SIL Ethnologue).
The closest major relative of Tamil is
Malayalam. Until about the 9th century, Malayalam was a dialect of Tamil.
Although many of the differences between Tamil and Malayalam demonstrate a pre-historic split of the western dialect,
the process of separation into a distinct language,
Malayalam was not completed until sometime in the 13th or 14th century.
History
Silver coin of king
Vashishtiputra Sātakarni (c. 160 CE).
Obv: Bust of king.
Prakrit legend in the
Brahmi script: "Siri Satakanisa Rano ... Vasithiputasa": "King Vasishtiputra Sri Satakarni"
Rev: Ujjain/Sātavāhana symbol left. Crescented six-arch chaitya hill right. River below. Early Tamil legend in the
Brahmi script: "Arah(s)anaku Vah(s)itti makanaku Tiru H(S)atakani ko" - which means "The ruler, Vasitti's son, Highness Satakani" -
-ko being the royal name suffix.
As a Dravidian language, Tamil descends from
Proto-Dravidian. Linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower
Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were the culture associated with the
Neolithic complexes of
South India.
The next phase in the reconstructed proto-history of Tamil is Proto-South Dravidian. The linguistic evidence suggests that Proto-South Dravidian was spoken around the middle of the second millennium BC, and that proto-Tamil emerged around the 3rd century BC. The earliest
epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been written shortly thereafter.
Among Indian languages, Tamil has the most ancient non-Sanskritized Indian literature.
Scholars categorise the attested history of the language into three periods, Old Tamil (300 BCE – 700 CE), Middle Tamil (700–1600) and Modern Tamil (1600–present).
Etymology
The exact period when the name "Tamil" came to be applied to the language is unclear, as is the precise etymology of the name. The earliest attested use of the name is in a text that is perhaps as early as the 1st century BCE.
Southworth suggests that the name comes from
tam-miḻ >
tam-iḻ 'self-speak', or 'one's own speech'.
Kamil Zvelebil suggests an etymology of
tam-iḻ, with
tam meaning "self" or "one's self", and "
-iḻ" having the connotation of "unfolding sound". Alternatively, he suggests a derivation of
tamiḻ <
tam-iḻ < *
tav-iḻ < *
tak-iḻ, meaning in origin "the proper process (of speaking)".
(see Southworth's derivation of Sanskrit term for "others" or Mleccha)
Old Tamil
The earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions from around the 2nd century BCE in caves and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the
Brahmi script called
Tamil Brahmi.
The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the
Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the 1st century BC.
A large number of literary works in Old Tamil have also survived. These include a corpus of 2,381 poems collectively known as
Sangam literature. These poems are usually dated to between the 1st and 5th centuries AD,
which makes them the oldest extant body of secular literature in India.
Other literary works in Old Tamil include two long epics,
Cilappatikāram and
Maṇimēkalai, and a number of ethical and didactic texts, written between the 5th and 8th centuries.
Old Tamil preserved many features of Proto-Dravidian, including the inventory of consonants,
the syllable structure,
and various grammatical features.
Amongst these was the absence of a distinct present tense – like Proto-Dravidian, Old Tamil only had two tenses, the past and the "non-past". Old Tamil verbs also had a distinct negative conjugation (e.g.
kāṇēṉ (காணேன்) "I do not see",
kāṇōm (காணோம்) "we do not see")
Nouns could take pronominal suffixes like verbs to express ideas: e.g.
peṇṭirēm (பெண்டிரேம்) "we are women" formed from
peṇṭir (பெண்டிர்) "women" +
-ēm (ஏம்) and the first person plural marker.
Despite the significant amount of grammatical and syntactical change between Old, Middle and Modern Tamil, Tamil demonstrates grammatical continuity across these stages: many characteristics of the later stages of the language have their roots in features of Old Tamil.
Middle Tamil
The evolution of Old Tamil into Middle Tamil, which is generally taken to have been completed by the 8th century,
was characterised by a number of phonological and grammatical changes. In phonological terms, the most important shifts were the virtual disappearance of the aytam (ஃ), an old phoneme,
the coalescence of the alveolar and dental nasals,
and the transformation of the alveolar
plosive into a
rhotic.
In grammar, the most important change was the emergence of the present tense. The present tense evolved out of the verb
kil (கில்), meaning "to be possible" or "to befall". In Old Tamil, this verb was used as an
aspect marker to indicate that an action was micro-durative, non-sustained or non-lasting, usually in combination with a time marker such as
ṉ (ன்). In Middle Tamil, this usage evolved into a present tense marker –
kiṉṟ (கின்ற) – which combined the old aspect and time markers.
Middle Tamil also saw a significant increase in the Sanskritisation of Tamil. From the period of the
Pallava dynasty onwards, a number of
Sanskrit loan-words entered Tamil, particularly in relation to political, religious and philosophical concepts.
Sanskrit also influenced Tamil grammar, in the increased use of cases and in declined nouns becoming adjuncts of verbs,
and phonology.
The Tamil script also changed in the period of Middle Tamil. Tamil Brahmi and
Vaṭṭeḻuttu, into which it evolved, were the main scripts used in Old Tamil inscriptions. From the 8th century onwards, however, the Pallavas began using a new script, derived from the
Pallava Grantha script which was used to write Sanskrit, which eventually replaced Vaṭṭeḻuttu.
Middle Tamil is attested in a large number of inscriptions, and in a significant body of secular and religious literature.
These include the religious poems and songs of the
Bhakthi poets, such as the
Tēvāram verses on
Saivism and
Nālāyira Tivya Pirapantam on
Vaishnavism,
and adaptations of religious legends such as the 12th century
Tamil Ramayana composed by
Kamban and the story of 63
shaivite devotees known as Periyapurāṇam.
Iraiyaṉār Akapporuḷ, an early treatise on love poetics, and
Naṉṉūl, a 12th century grammar that became the standard grammar of literary Tamil, are also from the Middle Tamil period.
Modern Tamil
The
Nannul remains the standard normative grammar for modern literary Tamil, which therefore continues to based on Middle Tamil of the 13th century rather than on Modern Tamil.
Colloquial spoken Tamil, in contrast, shows a number of changes. The negative conjugation of verbs, for example, has fallen out of use in Modern Tamil
– negation is, instead, expressed either morphologically or syntactically.
Modern spoken Tamil also shows a number of sound changes, in particular, a tendency to lower high vowels in initial and medial positions,
and the disappearance of vowels between plosives and between a plosive and rhotic.
Contact with European languages also affected both written and spoken Tamil. Changes in written Tamil include the use of European-style punctuation and the use of consonant clusters that were not permitted in Middle Tamil. The syntax of written Tamil has also changed, with the introduction of new aspectual auxiliaries and more complex sentence structures, and with the emergence of a more rigid word order that resembles the
syntactic argument structure of English.
Simultaneously, a strong strain of
linguistic purism emerged in the early 20th century, culminating in the
Pure Tamil Movement which called for removal of all Sanskritic and other foreign elements from Tamil.
It received some support from
Dravidian parties and
nationalists who supported
Tamil independence.
This led to the replacement of a significant number of Sanskrit loanwords by Tamil equivalents, though many others remain.
Geographic distribution
Distribution of Tamil speakers in South India and Sri Lanka (1961).
Tamil is the first language of the majority in
Tamil Nadu,
India and
Northern Province,
Eastern Province,
Sri Lanka. The language is spoken by small groups of minorities in other parts of these two countries including
Karnataka,
Andhra Pradesh,
Kerala,
Maharashtra and others in case of India and
Colombo,
the hill country, in case of Sri Lanka. Previously Tamil had a wider distribution in India than what it is currently. Tamil or dialects of it were used widely in the state of Kerala as the language of administration, literature and common usage until the 12th century CE. Tamil was also used widely in inscriptions found in southern
Andhra Pradesh districts of
Chittoor and
Nellore until the 12th centure CE.
There are currently sizable
Tamil-speaking populations descended from colonial-era migrants in
Malaysia,
Singapore,
Mauritius,
South Africa,
Indonesia,
Thailand,
Burma, and
Vietnam. Many in
Reunion,
Guyana,
Fiji,
Suriname, and
Trinidad and Tobago have Tamil origins,
but only a small number speak the language. In Reunion where Tamil language was forbidden to be learnt and used in public space is now being relearnt by students and adults.
It is also used by groups of migrants
from Sri Lanka and India in
Canada (especially
Toronto),
USA(especially
New Jersey),
Australia, many
Middle Eastern countries, and most of the western
European countries.
Legal status
Tamil is the
official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and one of the
22 languages under schedule 8 of the constitution of India. It is also one of the official languages of the union territories of
Puducherry and the
Andaman & Nicobar Islands.
Tamil is also one of the official languages of
Sri Lanka and
Singapore. In
Malaysia, 543 primary education
government schools are available fully in Tamil medium.
In addition, with the creation in 2004 of a legal status for classical languages by the
government of India and following a political campaign supported by several Tamil associations
. Tamil became the first legally recognised
Classical language of India. The recognition was announced by the then
President of India, Dr.
Abdul Kalam, who himself is a native Tamil speaker, in a joint sitting of both houses of the
Indian Parliament on June 6, 2004.
Dialects
Region specific variations
The
socio-linguistic situation of Tamil is characterised by
diglossia, there are two separate registers varying by social status, a high register and a low one.
Tamil dialects are primarily differentiated from each other by the fact that they have undergone different phonological changes and sound shifts in evolving from Old Tamil. For example, the word for "here"—
iṅku in
Centamil (the classic variety)—has evolved into
iṅkū in the Kongu dialect of
Coimbatore,
inga in the dialect of
Thanjavur, and
iṅkai in some
dialects of Sri Lanka. Old Tamil's
iṅkaṇ (where
kaṇ means place) is the source of
iṅkane in the dialect of
Tirunelveli, Old Tamil
iṅkaṭṭu is the source of
iṅkuṭṭu in the dialect of
Madurai, and
iṅkaṭe in various northern dialects. Even now in Coimbatore area it is common to hear "
akkaṭṭa" meaning "that place". Although Tamil dialects do not differ significantly in their vocabulary, there are a few exceptions. The dialects spoken in
Sri Lanka retain many words and grammatical forms that are not in everyday use in
India,
and use many other words slightly differently.
Loanword variations
The dialect of the district of
Palakkad in Kerala has a large number of
Malayalam loanwords, has also been influenced by Malayalam syntax and also has a distinct Malayalam accent. Similarly, Tamil spoken in Kanyakumari District has unique words and phonetic style than Tamil spoken at other parts of Tamil Nadu. The uniqueness of words and phonetics is such that, someone from
Kanyakumari district is easily identified by the spoken Tamil.
Hebbar and
Mandyam dialects, spoken by groups of Tamil
Vaishnavites who migrated to
Karnataka in the 11th century, retain many features of the
Vaishnava paribasai, a special form of Tamil developed in the 9th and 10th centuries that reflect Vaishnavite religious and spiritual values.
Several
castes have their own
sociolects which most members of that caste traditionally used regardless of where they come from. It is often possible to identify a person's caste by their speech.
Tamil in
Sri Lanka incorporates
loan words from
Portuguese,
Dutch and
English also.
Spoken and literary variants
In addition to its various dialects, Tamil exhibits different forms: a classical literary style modelled on the ancient language (
sankattamiḻ), a modern literary and formal style (
centamiḻ), and a modern
colloquial form (
koṭuntamiḻ). These styles shade into each other, forming a stylistic continuum. For example, it is possible to write
centamiḻ with a vocabulary drawn from
caṅkattamiḻ, or to use forms associated with one of the other variants while speaking
koṭuntamiḻ.
In modern times,
centamiḻ is generally used in formal writing and speech. For instance, it is the language of textbooks, of much of
Tamil literature and of public speaking and debate. In recent times, however,
koṭuntamiḻ has been making inroads into areas that have traditionally been considered the province of
centamiḻ. Most contemporary
cinema,
theatre and popular entertainment on television and radio, for example, is in
koṭuntamiḻ, and many
politicians use it to bring themselves closer to their audience. The increasing use of
koṭuntamiḻ in modern times has led to the emergence of unofficial ‘standard' spoken dialects. In
India, the ‘standard'
koṭuntamiḻ is based on ‘educated non-Brahmin speech', rather than on any one dialect,
but has been significantly influenced by the dialects of
Thanjavur and
Madurai. In
Sri Lanka the standard is based on the dialect of
Jaffna.
Writing system
After
Tamil Brahmi fell out of use, Tamil was written using a script called the
vaṭṭeḻuttu amongst others such as
Grantha and
Pallava script. The current Tamil script consists of 12
vowels, 18
consonants and one special character, the
āytam. The vowels and consonants combine to form 216 compound characters, giving a total of 247 characters (12 + 18 + 1 + 12 x 18). All consonants have an inherent vowel
a, as with other
Indic scripts. This inherency is removed by adding an overdot called a
puḷḷi, to the consonantal sign. For example,
ன is
ṉa (with the inherent
a) and
ன் is
ṉ (without a vowel). Many Indic scripts have a similar sign, generically called
virama, but the Tamil script is somewhat different in that it nearly always uses a visible
puḷḷi to indicate a
dead consonant (a consonant without a vowel). In other Indic scripts, it is generally preferred to use a ligature or a half form to write a syllable or a cluster containing a dead consonant, although writing it with a visible virama is also possible. The Tamil script does not differentiate voiced and unvoiced
plosives. Instead, plosives are articulated with voice depending on their position in a word, in accordance with the rules of
Tamil phonology.
In addition to the standard characters, six characters taken from the
Grantha script, which was used in the Tamil region to write Sanskrit, are sometimes used to represent sounds not native to Tamil, that is, words adopted from Sanskrit, Prakrit and other languages. The traditional system prescribed by classical grammars for writing loan-words, which involves respelling them in accordance with Tamil phonology, remains, but is not always consistently applied.
Sounds
Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of
retroflex consonants and multiple
rhotics. Tamil does not distinguish phonologically between voiced and unvoiced consonants; phonetically, voice is assigned depending on a consonant's position in a word.
Tamil phonology permits few consonant clusters, which can never be word initial. Native grammarians classify Tamil phonemes into vowels, consonants, and a "secondary character", the āytam.
Vowels
Tamil vowels are called
uyireḻuttu (
uyir – life,
eḻuttu – letter). The vowels are classified into short (
kuṟil) and long (
neṭil) (with five of each type) and two
diphthongs, /ai/ and /au/, and three "shortened" (
kuṟṟiyl) vowels.
The long vowels are about twice as long as the short vowels. The
diphthongs are usually pronounced about 1.5 times as long as the short vowels, though most grammatical texts place them with the long vowels.
Consonants
Tamil
consonants are known as
meyyeḻuttu (
mey—body,
eḻuttu—letters). The
consonants are classified into three categories with six in each category:
valliṉam—hard,
melliṉam—soft or
Nasal, and
iṭayiṉam—medium.
Unlike most Indian languages, Tamil does not distinguish
aspirated and unaspirated consonants. In addition, the voicing of
plosives is governed by strict rules in
centamiḻ. Plosives are unvoiced if they occur word-initially or doubled. Elsewhere they are voiced, with a few becoming
fricatives intervocalically.
Nasals and
approximants are always voiced.
As commonplace in languages of India, Tamil is characterised by its use of more than one type of
coronal consonants.
Retroflex consonants include the
retroflex approximant /ɻ/ (ழ) (example Tami
l), which among the Dravidian languages is also found in Malayalam (example Ko
zhikode), disappeared from
Kannada in pronunciation at around 1000 AD (the dedicated letter is still found in
Unicode), and was never present in
Telugu.
Dental and
alveolar consonants also contrast with each other, a typically Dravidian trait not found in the neighboring Indo-Aryan languages. In spoken Tamil, however, this contrast has been largely lost, and even in literary Tamil,
ந and
ன may be seen as
allophonic.
A chart of the Tamil consonant
phonemes in the
International Phonetic Alphabet follows:
Phonemes in brackets are
voiced equivalents. Both voiceless and voiced forms are represented by the same character in Tamil, and voicing is determined by context. The sounds
/f/ and
/ʂ/ are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, being found only in loanwords and frequently replaced by native sounds. There are well-defined rules for
elision in Tamil categorised into different classes based on the phoneme which undergoes elision.
Āytam
Classical Tamil also had a phoneme called the
Āytam, written as ‘ஃ'. Tamil grammarians of the time classified it as a dependent phoneme (or restricted phoneme
) (
cārpeḻuttu), but it is very rare in modern Tamil. The rules of pronunciation given in the
Tolkāppiyam, a text on the grammar of Classical Tamil, suggest that the
āytam could have
glottalised the sounds it was combined with. It has also been suggested that the
āytam was used to represent the
voiced implosive (or closing part or the first half) of geminated voiced plosives inside a word.
The Āytam, in modern Tamil, is also used to convert
pa to
fa (not the retroflex
zha [ɻ]) when writing English words using the Tamil script.
Numerals and symbols
Apart from the usual numerals, Tamil also has numerals for 10, 100 and 1000. Symbols for day, month, year, debit, credit, as above, rupee, and numeral are present as well.
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 100 | 1000 |
| ௦ | ௧ | ௨ | ௩ | ௪ | ௫ | ௬ | ௭ | ௮ | ௯ | ௰ | ௱ | ௲ |
| day | month | year | debit | credit | as above | rupee | numeral |
| ௳ | ௴ | ௵ | ௶ | ௷ | ௸ | ௹ | ௺ |
Grammar
Tamil employs
agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to mark
noun class,
number, and
case, verb
tense and other grammatical categories. Tamil's standard
metalinguistic terminology and scholarly vocabularly is itself Tamil, as opposed to the
Sanskrit that is standard for most other
Dravidian languages.
Much of Tamil grammar is extensively described in the oldest known grammar book for Tamil, the
Tolkāppiyam. Modern Tamil writing is largely based on the 13th century grammar
Naṉṉūl which restated and clarified the rules of the
Tolkāppiyam, with some modifications. Traditional Tamil grammar consists of five parts, namely
eḻuttu,
col,
poruḷ,
yāppu,
aṇi. Of these, the last two are mostly applied in poetry.
Tamil words consist of a
lexical root to which one or more
affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are
suffixes. Tamil suffixes can be
derivational suffixes, which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or
inflectional suffixes, which mark categories such as
person,
number,
mood,
tense, etc. There is no absolute limit on the length and extent of
agglutination, which can lead to long words with a large number of suffixes.
Morphology
Tamil nouns (and pronouns) are classified into two super-classes (
tiṇai)—the "rational" (
uyartiṇai), and the "irrational" (
akṟiṇai)—which include a total of five classes (
pāl, which literally means ‘gender').
Humans and
deities are classified as "rational", and all other nouns (
animals, objects, abstract nouns) are classified as irrational. The "rational" nouns and pronouns belong to one of three classes (
pāl)—masculine singular, feminine singular, and rational plural. The "irrational" nouns and pronouns belong to one of two classes: irrational singular and irrational plural. The
pāl is often indicated through suffixes. The plural form for rational nouns may be used as an
honorific, gender-neutral, singular form.
Suffixes are used to perform the functions of
cases or
postpositions. Traditional grammarians tried to group the various suffixes into eight cases corresponding to the cases used in
Sanskrit. These were the
nominative,
accusative,
dative,
sociative,
genitive,
instrumental,
locative, and
ablative. Modern grammarians argue that this classification is artificial,
and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case.
Tamil nouns can take one of four
prefixes,
i,
a,
u, and
e which are functionally equivalent to the
demonstratives in
English.
Tamil verbs are also inflected through the use of suffixes. A typical Tamil verb form will have a number of
suffixes, which show person, number, mood, tense, and voice.
- Person and number are indicated by suffixing the oblique case of the relevant pronoun. The suffixes to indicate tenses and voice are formed from grammatical particles, which are added to the stem.
- Tamil has two voices. The first indicates that the subject of the sentence undergoes or is the object of the action named by the verb stem, and the second indicates that the subject of the sentence directs the action referred to by the verb stem.
- Tamil has three simple tenses—past, present, and future—indicated by the suffixes, as well as a series of perfects indicated by compound suffixes. Mood is implicit in Tamil, and is normally reflected by the same morphemes which mark tense categories. Tamil verbs also mark evidentiality, through the addition of the hearsay clitic ām.
Traditional grammars of Tamil do not distinguish between
adjectives and
adverbs, including both of them under the category
uriccol, although modern grammarians tend to distinguish between them on morphological and syntactical grounds.
Tamil has a large number of
ideophones that act as adverbs indicating the way the object in a given state "says" or "sounds".
Tamil does not have
articles. Definiteness and indefiniteness are either indicated by special grammatical devices, such as using the number "one" as an indefinite article, or by the context.
In the first person plural, Tamil makes a distinction between
inclusive pronouns நாம்
nām (we), நமது
namatu (our) that include the addressee and exclusive pronouns நாங்கள்
nāṅkaḷ (we), எமது
ematu (our) that do not.
Syntax
Tamil is a consistently
head-final language. The verb comes at the end of the clause, with a typical word order of
Subject Object Verb (SOV).
However, word order in Tamil is also flexible, so that surface permutations of the SOV order are possible with different
pragmatic effects. Tamil has
postpositions rather than
prepositions. Demonstratives and modifiers precede the noun within the noun phrase. Subordinate clauses precede the verb of the matrix clause.
Tamil is a
null subject language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs, and objects. It is possible to construct grammatically valid and meaningful sentences which lack one or more of the three. For example, a sentence may only have a verb—such as
muṭintuviṭṭatu ("completed")—or only a subject and object, without a verb such as
atu eṉ vīṭu ("That [is] my house"). Tamil does not have a
copula (a linking verb equivalent to the word
is). The word is included in the translations only to convey the meaning more easily.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Tamil is mainly Dravidian. A strong sense of
linguistic purism is found in Modern Tamil,
which opposes the use of foreign loan-words.
Nonetheless, a number of words used in classical and modern Tamil indicate copying from languages of neighbouring groups, or with whom the Tamils had trading links, including
Munda (for example,
tavaḷai "frog" from Munda
tabeg),
Malay (e.g.
cavvarici "sago" from Malay
sāgu),
Chinese (for example,
campān "skiff" from Chinese san-pan) and Greek (for example,
ora from Greek ὥρα). In more modern times, Tamil has imported words from
Arabic,
Persian,
Urdu and
Marathi, reflecting groups that have influenced the Tamil area at various points of time, and from neighbouring languages such as
Telugu,
Kannada, and
Sinhala. During the modern period, words have also been adapted from European languages, such as
Portuguese,
French, and
English.
The strongest impact of purism in Tamil has been on words taken from Sanskrit. During its history, Tamil, along with other Dravidian languages like
Telugu,
Kannada,
Malayalam etc., was influenced by
Sanskrit in terms of vocabulary, grammar and literary styles,
reflecting the increased trend of
Sanskritisation in the Tamil country.
Tamil vocabulary never became quite as heavily Sanskritised as that of the other Dravidian languages, and unlike in those languages, it was and remains possible to express complex ideas (including in science, art, religion and law) without the use of Sanskrit loan words.
In addition, Sanskritisation was actively resisted by a number of authors of the late medieval period,
culminating in the 20th century in a movement called
taṉit tamiḻ iyakkam (meaning "pure Tamil movement"), led by
Parithimaar Kalaignar and
Maraimalai Adigal, which sought to remove the accumulated influence of Sanskrit on Tamil.
As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents, literature and public speeches has seen a marked decline in the use Sanskrit loan words in the past few decades,
under some estimates having fallen from 40–50% to about 20%.
As a result, the Prakrit and Sanskrit loan words used in modern Tamil are, unlike in some other Dravidian languages, restricted mainly to some spiritual terminology and
abstract nouns.
In the 20th century, institutions and learned bodies have, with government support, generated technical dictionaries for Tamil containing
neologisms and words derived from Tamil roots to replace loan words from English and other languages.
Words of Tamil origin occur in other languages. Popular
examples in English are cheroot (
curuṭṭu meaning "rolled up"),
mango (from
mangai),
mulligatawny (from
miḷaku taṉṉir meaning pepper water), pariah (from
paraiyan), curry (from
kari),
and catamaran (from
kaṭṭu maram, கட்டு மரம், meaning "bundled logs"),
pandal (shed, shelter, booth),
tyer (curd),
coir (rope).
Tamil words are
also found in Sinhala and Malay.
