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| Tamil language |
| 08.24.07 (1:21 am) [edit] |
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Tamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamils in India and Sri Lanka, with smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. It is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and also has official status in Sri Lanka and Singapore. With more than 77 million speakers, Tamil is one of the more widely spoken languages in the world.
Tamil has a literary tradition of more than two thousand years. The earliest epigraphic records found date to around 300 BCE and the Tolkappiyam, oldest known literary work in Tamil, has been dated variously between 300 BCE and 500 CE. 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. According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.
History
Tamil is one of the ancient languages of the world with a history of over 3000 years and literary work dating to over 2000 years ago. The origins of Tamil are not transparent, but it developed and flourished in India as an independent language with a rich literature. More than 55% of epigraphical inscriptions in India were found in Tamil language Unlike in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh where early inscriptions were written in Sanskrit, the early inscriptions in Tamil Nadu used Tamil exclusively.
Tamil has the oldest extant literature amongst the Dravidian languages, but dating the language and the literature precisely is difficult. Literary works in India were preserved either in palm leaf manuscripts or through oral transmission, making direct dating impossible. External chronological records and internal linguistic evidence, however, indicate that the oldest extant works were probably compiled sometime between the 2nd century BCE and the 10th century CE.
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