2ND LEAD

Written and spoken: learning conversion of Eezham Tamil

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 13:21 GMT]
One of the problems faced by the diaspora children in learning Tamil is relating the spoken and written forms. There is already a useful teaching material addressing this need, produced by Sankaran Radhakrishnan and brought out by the South Asia Institute of the University of Texas at Austin. But this is for the spoken Tamil of Tamil Nadu. A need of the time is linguists among Eezham Tamils to come out with a similar material identifying the rules of conversion for Eezham Tamil.

Tamil is one of the very few languages of the world enjoying the special status of being classical as well as living.

Standard forms and colloquial forms of Tamil continued to exist in parallel right from very early times. This could be seen through a comparison of Tamil between literature and inscriptions. In a way, the parallel status was even grammatically recognized as Chenthamizh (standard Tamil) and Kodunthamizh (colloquial Tamil or dialectal Tamil).

Native learners living in Tamil environment can always distinguish the difference and could switch from one to another with ease.

But the gap between spoken and written Tamil is a puzzle for foreign learners.

The same difficulty is faced by Tamil diaspora children whose learning of Tamil is actually a second language leaning, confined to community schools they attend during weekends.

Their exposure to Tamil environment is restricted to the Tamil they speak at home and among the diaspora, if at all they speak it, and to the audio-visual media such as Tamil cinema. The difficulty they face in the conversion of spoken form into written form is quite evident in the community schools.

A publication brought out by South Asia Institute of the University of Texas at Austin in 2002 and available in the web is of much use for foreign and diaspora learners of Tamil language.

‘Tamil Conversion’ Written to Spoken, by Sankaran Radhakrishnan is a 59 pages work of 11 chapters, precisely bringing out the rules of conversion between written and spoken Tamil with examples.

Radhakrishnan’s publication, reducing the conversion into learnable rules, is commendable and timely to address the needs of the Tamil diaspora that has now grown into millions and found spread all across the world.

However the conversion found in the publication is confined to the spoken Tamil of Tamil Nadu.

Eezham Tamils may use it by replacing the examples with their own spoken forms, but it would be ideal if scholars of linguistic background among Eezham Tamils could work on a publication like this, bringing out the rules of conversion between written and spoken forms of Eezham Tamil, for the benefit of their diaspora children.

The link to download the PDF of Texas University material is provided here:

External Links:

University of Texas:

PDF: Tamil Conversion: Written to Spoken