TAMIL LANGUAGE

language of the Dravidian family, spoken in southern India; it is the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu (Madras). Other Tamil speakers live in Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma), Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, eastern Africa, South Africa, Guyana, and islands in the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean. There are several regional dialects of Tamil, two social dialects (Brahman and non-Brahman), and a sharp dichotomy (diglossia) between literary and colloquial Tamil. Like the other Dravidian languages, Tamil is characterized by a series of retroflex consonants (e.g., t, d, n; sounds pronounced with the tongue tip curled back against the roof of the mouth) and by its method of indicating such grammatical categories as tense, number, person, and case with suffixes. Writing in Tamil can be traced back to inscriptions dating from the 3rd century BC that were written in an early dialect of Old Tamil with an alphabet adapted from the Brahmi script, which is ancestral to all modern Indian alphabets. Modern Tamil has two types of script: Grantha, which is used in Tamil Nadu to write in Sanskrit; and Vattelluttu (round script), which is in common use.