Tamil language
Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 10:26 pmTamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamils in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore where it has an official status; with significant minorities in Malaysia, Mauritius, and Réunion, and emigrant communities around the world. It is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, classical language in India, and has official status in India , Sri Lanka and Singapore. With more than 77 million speakers, Tamil is one of the widely spoken languages in the world.
Tamil has a continuous literary tradition of over two thousand years. The earliest epigraphic records found date to around 300 BC and the Tolkāppiyam , oldest known treatise in Tamil, has been dated variously between second century BC and tenth century AD The earliest period of Tamil literature indicates the Sangam literature, which is dated from 300 BC till 600 AD. Tamil was declared a classical language of India by the Government of India in 2004 and was the first Indian language to have been accorded the status.
Tamil employs agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to mark noun class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. Unlike other Dravidian languages, the metalanguage of Tamil, the language used to describe the technical linguistic terms of the language and its structure, is also Tamil (rather than Sanskrit). According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.
Tamil has a continuous literary tradition of over two thousand years. The earliest epigraphic records found date to around 300 BC and the Tolkāppiyam , oldest known treatise in Tamil, has been dated variously between second century BC and tenth century AD The earliest period of Tamil literature indicates the Sangam literature, which is dated from 300 BC till 600 AD. Tamil was declared a classical language of India by the Government of India in 2004 and was the first Indian language to have been accorded the status.
Tamil employs agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to mark noun class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. Unlike other Dravidian languages, the metalanguage of Tamil, the language used to describe the technical linguistic terms of the language and its structure, is also Tamil (rather than Sanskrit). According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.