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Tamil

Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken by around 52 million people worldwide. The earliest known Tamil inscriptions date back to at least 500 BC, while the oldest literary text was composed around 200 BC. The Tamil alphabet evolved from the Brahmi script and is well-suited for writing literary Tamil but less so for colloquial Tamil. It is a syllabic alphabet written left-to-right on horizontal lines, with vowels appearing as independent letters at the start of syllables.

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381 views3 pages

Tamil

Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken by around 52 million people worldwide. The earliest known Tamil inscriptions date back to at least 500 BC, while the oldest literary text was composed around 200 BC. The Tamil alphabet evolved from the Brahmi script and is well-suited for writing literary Tamil but less so for colloquial Tamil. It is a syllabic alphabet written left-to-right on horizontal lines, with vowels appearing as independent letters at the start of syllables.

Uploaded by

Kalliammah Krishnan
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Tamil

Origin
The earliest known Tamil inscriptions date back to at least 500 BC. The oldest literary text in Tamil, Tolkppiyam, was composed around 200 BC. The Tamil alphabet is is thought to have evolved from the Brahmi script, though some scholars believe that its origins go back to the Indus script. The alphabet is well suited to writing literary Tamil, centamil. However it is ill-suited to writing colloquial Tamil, koduntamil. During the 19th century, attempts were made to create a written version of the colloquial spoken language. Nowadays the colloquial written language appears mainly in school books and in passages of dialogue in fiction.

Notable features

Type of writing system: syllabic alphabet Direction of writing: left to right in horizontal lines When they appear the the beginning of a syllable, vowels are written as independent letters. Some of the non-standard consonant-vowel combinations are not used in official documents. The alphabet was originally written on palm leaves. As a result, the letters are made up mainly of curved strokes which didn't rip the leaves.

Used to write:
Tamil, a Dravidian language spoken by around 52 million people in Indian, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, the USA, UK and Australia. It is the first language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and is spoken by a significant minority of people (2 million) in northeastern Sri Lanka.

Tamil alphabet
Vowels and vowel diacritics

Non-standard consonant-vowel combinations

Consonants

The final five consonants (the blue ones) are known as grantha letters and are used to write consonants borrowed from Sanskrit, and also some words of English origin.

Numerals

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