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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.
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".
There are many Tamil loanwords in other languages. The Tamil language, primarily spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka, has produced loanwords in many different languages, including Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, English, Malay, native languages of Indonesia, Mauritian Creole, Tagalog, Russian, and Sinhala and Dhivehi.
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]
The Tamil script (தமிழ் அரிச்சுவடி Tamiḻ ariccuvaṭi [tamiɻ ˈaɾitːɕuʋaɽi]) is an abugida script that is used by Tamils and Tamil speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere to write the Tamil language. [5] It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic.
Incidentally, the Tamil typewriter used for the project, with a keyboard developed by Yost of the American Mission, was the first to be ever used in an office in India. [4] When Chandler retired in 1922 at the age of 80, about 81,000 words had been compiled. Few more words were added soon, and in 1924 the Lexicon went to press.
Tamil is an agglutinative language – words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes . These can be derivational suffixes , which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or inflectional suffixes , which mark categories such as person , number , mood , tense , etc.
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.