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Tamil Language
 The
Tamil language is one of the oldest dialects known to
man having been around for many centuries and it is also
one of the two classical languages of India. Since
existing about two thousand years, the Tamil language
has endured time and is still spoken today by over 65
million people worldwide. Tamil is the
pre-eminent member of the Dravidian language
family and has one of the longest unbroken literary
traditions of any living language in the world[1].
The oldest known parchment (palm leaf manuscripts)
containing Tamil writings have been dated back to 200
BCE.
The earliest form of Tamil literature that is still used
todate is called Sangam. Sangam mainly
comprised a collection of poetry written either about
love (Akam) or War (Puram). This literature has been
dated back between 500BC and 200AD. Following Sangam
was another collection of literature known as
Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural, which is a collection of
verses that discussed about ‘Life’ and its problems. The
Tiruukural was written out in three books, each
discussing topics of ‘Virtue’, ‘Wealth’ and ‘Pleasure’.
Classical stories were written out in form of ‘Epics’,
which came out some time after the Tirrukural. Some of
the first widely known epics were called
Silappadhikaram and Manimekhalai.
Devotional literature was also written in the Tamil
language. Such form of literature derived form the Hindu
religion and was called Nayanmars. Seeing that
the Hindu religion was expressed in the form of
devotional literature, other religions such as
Christianity and Islam, between the thirteenth and
eighteenth centuries, followed its influences. The
Muslims expressed their devotion to God through
Umaruppulavar, which was a 500 verse poem that
discussed the life of Prophet Mohammed. Christians
demonstrated their influence by the Hindu religion
through poetical works that was brought by the British,
Dutch, French and Portuguese. As society developed into
the twentieth century, many individual writers also
began to have an influence on the Tamil language with
their pieces and style of writing. An example of such
writers was Subramania Bharati.
Since the early years to the present, not much of the
original reading, writing and speaking of the Tamil
language has changed although from country to country
there are minor differences in accents/dialects. Tamil
ranks the seventeenth language amongst the top twenty
languages spoken in the world. Currently, Tamil is the
official language of Tamil Nadu, a state in India and is
also one of the official languages of Sri Lanka,
Malaysia, and Singapore.
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[1]
http://www.thatparan.com/tamil.htm
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