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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.
The Tamil language is one of the longest-surviving classical languages, with over two thousand years of written history, dating back to the Sangam period (between 300 BCE and 300 CE). Tamils constitute about 5.7% of the Indian population and form the majority in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the union territory of Puducherry .
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 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. Sri Lankan Tamil dialects retain many words and grammatical forms that are not in everyday use in Tamil Nadu, [5] [6] and use many other words slightly differently. [7]
In 1578, Portuguese Christian missionaries published a Tamil prayer book in old Tamil script named Thambiran Vanakkam, thus making Tamil the first Indian language to be printed and published. [57] The Tamil Lexicon , published by the University of Madras , was one of the earliest dictionaries published in Indian languages.
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]
This category contains articles with Tamil-language text. The primary purpose of these categories is to facilitate manual or automated checking of text in other languages. This category should only be added with the {} family of templates, never explicitly.
In April 2010, the Tamil Internet Conference held a contest for college students across the state of Tamil Nadu, India for increasing content on the Tamil Wikipedia. [7] The contest was made with regards to the World Classical Tamil Conference 2010, a meeting of Tamil scholars across the world who discuss modern development of the language ...