Tamil
Description
Tamil, a language with a long and ancient literary tradition, has been spoken in southern India for several millennia. Ninety-two percent of its speakers live in India's southern Tamil Nadu State, where it is spoken by 48 million first language speakers. By some accounts, second-language speakers also number in the millions in the southern part of the Indian subcontinent.
In northern Sri Lanka between three and four million people, about 20 percent of the population of that island state, speak Tamil. Elsewhere there are several hundreds of thousands of speakers in each of South Africa, Malaysia, and Singapore; some 6,000 live in Fiji. There are significant minorities in Mauritius, Great Britain, the US, and Canada. Total speakers, including second-language speakers, number about 66 million (Grimes 1992).
Tamil is a member of the Dravidian family, whose members are nearly all spoken in southern India.
Tamil is written in a syllabic system like that of other South Asian languages. It derives from the Ashokan Brahmi script. Vowels have two forms, once used at the beginning of a word, another used following consonant symbols.
Besides loans from Sanskrit, and some borrowing from Persian and Arabic, English in modern times has supplied a lot of loan words, but because of the emphasis on linguistic purism in Tamil grammatical tradition loans are assimilated to the phonological system.
All Tamil speakers, including the uneducated, use two varieties of the language which only roughly correspond to the difference between literary and spoken Tamil. A high status variety is used in most writing, the media--including radio and television broadcasts--political speeches and other similar occasions. In contrast, a low status variety is used in every day discourse and conversations. It is also used in film and some authors of fiction use the variety as do some politicians and lecturers to create solidarity, or enhance intimacy, with their audiences.
In both India and Sri Lanka, Tamil has the status of an official language. In India it is one of fourteen official languages, and in Sri Lanka it shares that status with Sinhalese. It is the first official language of India's Tamil Nadu state. Among the four ancient literary languages of southern India (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu) Tamil has the longest tradition. The earliest records date from inscriptions from 200 BC.
(Source: UCLA Language Materials Project Language Profile)
Courses
230. (SARS530) Beginning Tamil. (E) Renganathan.
This course introduces students to colloquial Tamil and formal written Tamil. A balance between production skills, viz. writing and speaking, and comprehension skills, viz. reading and listening, will be maintained throughoutthe course. Reading materials will introduce students to customs and habits of the Tamil speakers in Tamil Nadu, Sri-Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore. Lessons in the class will be based on a set of Tamil learning software made available at the MMETS Server. This software will be customized to the needs of students.
232 SARS532) Intermediate Tamil. (E) Renganathan.
This course develops the skills obtained either from the Beginning Tamil course or from students' prior exposure to Tamil. The emphasis will be on using the language in actual environments both in spoken medium and in written medium. Multimedia materials such as audio and video facilities will be used extensively to provide students an exposure to the Tamil culture and customs. Besides improving their speech and writing, students will also be introduced gradually to Tamil literature, which has two thousand years of literary history. The learning process in this course will be facilitated by appropriate software equipped with multimedia facilities.
234. (SARS534) Advanced Tamil. (C) Renganathan.
This course is intended for learners with a high degree of proficiency in most of the skills. The course is designated to meet the specific needs of the learners. Reading materials for this course can be either classical Tamil texts or the modern Tamil prose texts.
Instructor
Dr. Vasu Renganathan
Email
vasur@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Links:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/plc/tamilweb/