Sri Lankan Tamil dialects - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Sri Lankan Tamil dialects or Ceylon Tamil dialects form a group of Tamil

Tamil language

Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...

dialect

Dialect

The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...

s used in the modern country of Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...

by Sri Lankan Tamil people that is distinct from the dialects of modern Tamil spoken in Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...

and Kerala

Kerala

or Keralam is an Indian state located on the Malabar coast of south-west India. It was created on 1 November 1956 by the States Reorganisation Act by combining various Malayalam speaking regions....

states

States and territories of India

India is a federal union of states comprising twenty-eight states and seven union territories. The states and territories are further subdivided into districts and so on.-List of states and territories:...

of India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. Tamil dialects are differentiated by the phonological change

Phonological change

In historical linguistics, phonological change is any sound change which alters the number or distribution of phonemes in a language.In a typological scheme first systematized by Henry M...

s and sound shifts in their evolution from classical or Old Tamil (300 BC - 700 CE). It is broadly categorized into three sub groups: Jaffna Tamil, Batticaloa Tamil and Negombo Tamil

Negombo Tamil dialect

Negombo Tamil dialect or Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil is a Sri Lankan Tamil language dialect used by the fishers of Negombo, Sri Lanka. This is just one of the many dialects used by the remnant population of formerly Tamil speaking people of the western Puttalam District and Gampaha District of Sri...

dialects. These dialects are also used by ethnic groups other than Tamils such as Sinhalese people

Sinhalese people

The Sinhalese are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group,forming the majority of Sri Lanka,constituting 74% of the Sri Lankan population.They number approximately 15 million worldwide.The Sinhalese identity is based on language, heritage and religion. The Sinhalese speak Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan language and the...

, Sri Lankan Moors

Sri Lankan Moors

The Sri Lankan Moors are the third largest ethnic group in Sri Lanka comprising 8% of the country's total population . They are predominantly followers of Islam. The Moors trace their ancestry to Arab traders who settled in Sri Lanka some time between the 8th and 15th centuries...

and Veddas, who consider them to be distinct.

Characteristics

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 varieties in Sri Lanka although different from those of Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

share some common features between the southern dialects of Tamil Nadu and the northern Sri Lankan Tamil dialect, the language of Jaffna. Sri Lankan Tamil dialects retain many words and grammatical forms that are not in everyday use in India

India

, and use many other words slightly differently. The Sri Lankan Tamil dialects are less influenced by Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

and the western languages, although there are western and Sanskrit loan words

Loan words in Sri Lankan Tamil

Loan words in Sri Lankan Tamil came about mostly due contact between colonial powers and the native population. Linguists study a language's lexicon for a number of reasons. Languages such as Tamil with centuries of literature and multi-cultural contact offer the chance to compare the various...

in day to day usage. In general Sri Lankan Tamil dialects are considered to be more conservative than the continental Tamil dialects.

Negombo Tamil

The Negombo Tamil dialect

Negombo Tamil dialect

used in Negombo area by bilingual fishers who otherwise identify them as Sinhalese has undergone considerable morphosyntactic convergence with spoken or colloquial Sinhala, as a consequence of contact with it. It has also developed a number of other grammatical traits under the probable influence of Sinhala, including a postposed indefinite article, an indefinitizing postclitic –sari (apparently modeled on Sinhala –hari), and case assignments for defective verbs that follow the Sinhala, rather than Tamil, patterns of agreement.

Batticaloa Tamil

Batticaloa Tamil dialect is shared between Tamils, Moors

Sri Lankan Moors

, Veddhas and Portuguese Burghers

Portuguese Burghers

The Portuguese Burghers are an ethnic group in Sri Lanka, of mixed Portuguese and Sri Lankan descent. They are Roman Catholic and spoke the Sri Lanka Indo-Portuguese language, a creole based on Portuguese. In modern times, English has become the common language while Sinhalese is taught in school...

in the eastern province. The Tamil dialect used by residents of the Trincomalee

Trincomalee

Trincomalee is a port city in Eastern Province, Sri Lanka and lies on the east coast of the island, about 113 miles south of Jaffna. It has a population of approximately 100,000 . The city is built on a peninsula, which divides the inner and outer harbours. Overlooking the Kottiyar Bay,...

district has many similarities with the Jaffna Tamil dialect.According to Kamil Zvelebil

Kamil Zvelebil

Kamil Václav Zvelebil was a distinguished Czech scholar in Indian literature and linguistics, notably Tamil, Sanskrit, Dravidian linguistics and literature and philology.- Biography :...

a linguist, the Batticaloa Tamil dialect is the most literary like of all spoken dialects of Tamil, and it has preserved several very antique features, and has remained more true to the literary norm than any other form of Tamil while developing a few striking innovations. Although Batticaloa Tamil has some very specific features of vocabulary, it is classified with other Sri Lankan Tamil dialects as it is related to them by characteristic traits of its phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

. It also maintains some words that are unique to present day .

Jaffna Tamil

The dialect used in Jaffna is the oldest and most archaic and is claimed to be closest to old Tamil. It is considered to preserve many antique features of Old Tamil that predate Tolkāppiyam

Tolkappiyam

The Tolkāppiyam is a work on the grammar of the Tamil language and the earliest extant work of Tamil literature. It is written in the form of noorpaa or short formulaic compositions and comprises three books - the Ezhuttadikaram, the Solladikaram and the Poruladikaram. Each of these books is...

, the grammatical treatise of Tamil. The Jaffna Tamil dialect retained many forms of words which were used in Sangam literature

Sangam literature

Sangam literature refers to a body of classical Tamil literature created between the years c. 600 BCE to 300 CE. This collection contains 2381 poems composed by 473 poets, some 102 of whom remain anonymous The period during which these poems were composed is commonly referred to as the Sangam...

such as Tirukkuṛaḷ

Tirukkuṛaḷ

Tirukkuṛaḷ , sometimes spelt 'Thirukkural, is a classic of couplets or Kurals or aphorisms celebrated by Tamils. It was authored by Thiruvalluvar, a poet who is said to have lived anytime between the 2nd and 6th centuries AD. Although the exact period of its composition is still disputed,...

and Kuṟuntokai

Kuruntokai

Kuruntokai ,a classical Tamil poetic work, is the second book of Ettuthokai, a Sangam literature anthology. Kuruntokai contains poems dealing with matters of love and separation content matter and were written by numerous authors. Nachinarkiniyar, a Tamil scholar living during the sixth or the ...

. Jaffna Tamil dialect is not mutually intelligible with Indian Tamil dialects, though both share a diglossic `H' variety in literary Tamil. It is frequently mistaken for Malayalam by native Indian Tamil speakers. There are a number of Prakrit

Prakrit

Prakrit is the name for a group of Middle Indic, Indo-Aryan languages, derived from Old Indic dialects. The word itself has a flexible definition, being defined sometimes as, "original, natural, artless, normal, ordinary, usual", or "vernacular", in contrast to the literary and religious...

loans words that are unique to the Jaffna Tamil. A subdialect retained by the Paraiyar

Paraiyar

Paraiyar, Parayar, and Sambavar, anglicised by Europeans as Pariah are a social group found in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and in Sri Lanka . In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, though they have been enumerated under three different caste names, they have generally been referred to as...

people of Kayts

Kayts

Kayts , is one of the important villages in Velanai Island which is a small island off the coast of Jaffna Peninsula in the North of Sri Lanka. There are number of other villages within the Velanai Island such as Allaipiddy, Mankumpan, Velanai, Saravanai, Puliyankoodal, Suruvil, Naranthanai and...

still retains a number of archaic words and Prakrit loans not found in any other dialects of Tamil. These drummers had historically played an important role as ritual players of drums at funerals and folk temples and as heralds and traditional weavers. They also maintained the family records of their feudal

Feudalism

Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...

lord

Lord

Lord is a title with various meanings. It can denote a prince or a feudal superior . The title today is mostly used in connection with the peerage of the United Kingdom or its predecessor countries, although some users of the title do not themselves hold peerages, and use it 'by courtesy'...

s and even practiced medicine and astrology in folk traditions

External links

Collection of riddles from Jaffna Tamil

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