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Tamil has 3 forms: Cankatamizh, modelled on Old Tamil, Centamizh, the style used in modern formal contexts today, and Kotuntamizh, the modern colloquial form. These styles form a continuum, so that some writers use Cenkatamizh words while writing in Centamizh. Cenkatamizh and Centamizh are very different from the various dialects of Kotuntamizh.
Tamil or dialects of it were used widely in the state of Kerala as the major language of administration, literature and common usage until the 12th century CE. Tamil was also used widely in inscriptions found in southern Andhra Pradesh districts of Chittoor and Nellore until the 12th century CE. [1]
Dravidian languages include Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, and a number of other languages spoken mainly in South Asia. The list is by no means exhaustive. Some of the words can be traced to specific languages, but others have disputed or uncertain origins. Words of disputed or less certain origin are in the "Dravidian languages" list.
The dialect used in Jaffna preserves many features of Old Tamil that predate Tolkāppiyam, the earliest grammatical treatise of Tamil. [9] For example, Jaffna Tamil preserves the three way deictic distinction (ivan, uvan, avan, corresponding to proximal, medial and distal respectively), whereas all other Tamil dialects have eliminated the medial form. [1]
A characteristic of Tanglish or Tamil-English code-switching is the addition of Tamil affixes to English words. [12] The sound "u" is added at the end of an English noun to create a Tamil noun form, as in "soundu" and the words "girl-u heart-u black-u" in the lyrics of "Why This Kolaveri Di".
Sri Lankan Tamil dialects are distinct from the Tamil dialects used in Tamil Nadu, India.They are used in Sri Lanka and in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora.Linguistic borrowings from European colonizers such as the Portuguese, English and the Dutch have also contributed to a unique vocabulary that is distinct from the colloquial usage of Tamil in the Indian mainland.
It preserves many antique features of Old Tamil that predate Tolkāppiyam, the earliest grammatical treatise of Tamil. The Jaffna Tamil dialect also retains many forms of words and phonemes which were used in Sangam literature such as Tirukkuṛaḷ and Kuṟuntokai, which has gone out of vogue in most Indian Tamil dialects. [2]
The words are transliterated according to IAST system. All words have been referenced with the Madras University Tamil Lexicon, which is used as the most authoritative and standard lexicon by mainstream scholars. [3] [4] In the examples below, the second word is from Tamil, and its original Indo-Aryan source is placed to the left.