The Tamil Language

Tamil (தமிழ்) is a classical language and one of the major languages of the Dravidian language family. Spoken predominantly by Tamils in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore, it has smaller communities of speakers in many other countries, with over 74 million speakers worldwide. It is one of the official languages of India, Singapore and Sri Lanka.

Tamil is one of the few living classical languages and has an unbroken literary tradition of over two thousand years. The written language has changed little during this period, with the result that classical literature is as much a part of everyday Tamil as modern literature. Tamil school-children, for example, are still taught the alphabet using the aa-thi-choodi, an alphabet rhyme attributed to the poet Auvaiyar who lived during the thirteenth century CE. The name 'Tamil' is an anglicised form of the native name தமிழ்.

History of Tamil

A set of palm leaf manuscripts from the 15th century or the 16th century, containing Christian prayers in Tamil

The Tamil alphabet is descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India. The earliest known Tamil inscriptions date back to at least 500 BC. The oldest literary text in Tamil, Tol-kaapiyam, was composed around 200 BC.

The alphabet is well suited to writing literary Tamil, Sentamil. 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.

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.
 

Introducing the Tamil alphabet

Vowels and vowel diacritics

Non-standard consonant-vowel combinations

Consonants

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

Numerals

The numerals rarely appear in modern Tamil texts.  Instead, 'Arabic' numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) are used.

Other symbols