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The Tamil language is native to Tamil Nadu , Puducherry (India) and Sri Lanka, where most of the native Tamil speaking population is highly concentrated. Tamil is also recognized as a classical language by the Government of India in 2004 and was the first language to achieve such status. [1] Tamil is one of the 22 official languages of India. [2]
For example maɳam (smell) in Indian Tamil is manam in ET. ‘ɳ’ in ET occurs only in loan words or preceding /c/ and /ɳ/ in Indian Tamil is realized as /n/ in ET. For example ‘koɳjam’ (a little) in Indian Tamil is ‘koɳcam’ in ET. [1] Morphological differences can be found between Indian Tamil and ET as well.
Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka predominantly speak Tamil, however depending on where they live in the country, they may also additionally speak Sinhala and or English. According to the 2012 Census 61.5% or 412,685 Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka also spoke Sinhala and 13.0% or 87,435 Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka also spoke English. [23]
The Tamil language is spoken by native Sri Lankan Tamils and is also spoken by Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka and by most Sri Lankan Moors. Tamil speakers number around 4.8 million (29% of the population), making it the second largest language in Sri Lanka. There are more than 40,000 speakers of the Sri Lankan Malay language.
In spite of the continual contact with India by sea, Sri Lankan Tamils have over the centuries become a distinct people developing dialects that differ in several aspects from the Indian Tamil dialects. [5] The Jaffna Tamil dialect is also distinct to a lesser extent from that of the Eastern, Western and Upcountry Tamil dialects of Sri Lanka. [6]
As Tamil is a diglossic language the differences between the standard written languages across the globe is minimal but the spoken varieties differ considerably. The spoken Tamil varieties in Sri Lanka although different from those of Tamil Nadu in India share some common features with the southern dialects of Tamil Nadu.
Tamil is a Unicode block containing characters for the Tamil, and Saurashtra languages of Tamil Nadu India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. In its original incarnation, the code points U+0B82..U+0BCD were a direct copy of the Tamil characters A2-ED from the 1988 ISCII standard.
Indian Moors were brought to Sri Lanka for the same reasons as the Indian Tamils, as labourers to the plantations. In 1971 Indian Moors numbered 29,416 declining from 55,400 in 1963. Their decline was partly due to returning to India and some declaring themselves and being enumerated as Sri Lankan Moors.