Introduction
Tamil is part of the Dravidian language family. It is mainly spoken in South Asia. It is the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu in India, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. It is spoken in Malaysia, Mauritius, Fiji, and South Africa. The diaspora is now spread all around the world making the number of Tamil speakers well over 66 million.
The Tamil civilization has a very ancient history, and settlements have been found in Tamilnadu that date back to 500 BCE. The recent excavations at Keezhadi in the Vaigai river valley has pushed the timeline of this even further. Tamil as a language has a rich literary history. The earliest known inscriptions in Tamil date back to about 500 BCE. Tamil literature started to appear in 300 BCE, and the language used until the 700 AD is known as Old Tamil. From 700-1600 AD the language is known as Middle Tamil, and since 1600 AD, the language has been known as Modern Tamil.
Tamil was originally written with a version of the Brahmi script known as Tamil Brahmi. By the 5th century BCE this script had become more rounded and developed into the Vaṭṭeḻuttu script. In the 6th century during the Pallava dynasty (275-897 AD), a new script for Tamil, known as the Chola-Pallava script, was devised. It also used some letters from Vaṭṭeḻuttu in Sanskrit loanwords. By the 8th century, the Chola-Pallava script was used instead of Vaṭṭeḻuttu in the northern part of the Tamil-speaking area, although Vaṭṭeḻuttu continued to be used in the south until the 11th century. During the next few centuries, the modern Tamil script evolved from the Chola-Pallava script.
During the 19th century, the Tamil script was simplified to make it easier to typeset. Further simplifications in the 20th century included the regularization of vowel markers.
The Tamil alphabet is well suited to writing literary Tamil, centamiḻ (செந்தமிழ்). However it is ill-suited to writing colloquial Tamil, koṭuntamiḻ (கொடுந்தமிழ்). During the 19th century, attempts were made to create a written version of the colloquial spoken language. Nowadays, the colloquial written language appears mainly in school books and in passages of dialogue in fiction.
Spoken Tamil has changed substantially over time, including changes in the phonological structure of words. This has created diglossia—a system in which there are distinct differences between colloquial forms of a language and those that are used in formal and written contexts.
