Standardization or restandardization: The case for "Standard" Spoken Tamil (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
This paper is a contribution to an anthropology of aurality in Tamil Nādu. Using a sociolinguistic approach to performance, I shall argue that contemporary low caste performers in Tamil Nādu are part of a discursive tradition that dates back to Caṅkam times in order to show how this tradition, the dialogue between the art of writing and the practice of speech, is actually a feeling in Tamil that affects the concept of locality in Tamil. This feeling, or spoken Tamil, is a kind of aural competence. In performance, it is a way of speaking with writing in mind. In writing, it is that sentiment which demonstrates a kind of ethnographic authority. Caṅkam literature, Bhakti devotion, Tamil nationalism--indeed, the practice of spoken Tamil has been, and continues to be, a mode of organizing people in light of the state. Then and now, spoken Tamil has never been about how people really speak. Rather, it has always been a way of producing citizens by manufacturing aural competence.
Taminglish is a reality now. English teachers in Tamil society are made to feel guilty about what they are being accused of doing as a profession—the teaching of English as " a neo-imperialistic language(!) " to Tamil learners of English at different levels. Politicians and Tamil activists alike raise a lot of hue and cry against the mixing of English in the daily Tamil discourses. They often fail to understand a linguistic fact that changes on account of language contact do not amount to corruption but enrichment of the languages involved and that change is natural and inevitable in the history and development of any language. Changes happen neither for worse nor for better. They come from inside and from outside the language. However, 'Tamil lovers' would like to artificially maintain the classical status of Tamil even now when Tamil society has irretrievably become a bilingual and bi-cultural community. One of the psychological impacts of such a political project of preserving the purity of Tamil on English teaching community is that they refuse to accept the bilingual method of teaching English without any professional basis. The process of language development has always been independent of human intervention and therefore, Tamil is firmly entering a new phase of its development, which in this article, is termed as " Taminglish. " Through a recent order, the government of India has instructed all its employees to follow 'Hinglish' in the Devanagiri script for official communication. Tamil has already permitted hundreds of English words and set expressions both in oral and written discourses. This paper interrogates diachronically and longitudinally the history behind the evolution of the phenomenon called 'Taminglish,' a process of code-mixing/switching in Tamil/English discourse, and establishes that English teachers need not feel guilty about this linguistic hybridity.
Sociolinguistic typology in North East India: A tale of two branches
Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics. Volume 1, Issue 1, Pages 59–82
Long-standing ideas about the "linguistic cycle" hold that languages naturally shift from analytic to synthetic morphological patterns and then from synthetic back to analytic in a long-term cyclic pattern. But the demonstrable history of actual languages shows dramatic differences in their tendencies to shift in either direction, and there are well-known examples of language families which preserve complexity or analyticity over millennia. We see the same thing within Tibeto-Burman, where some branches are highly synthetic and others analytic. Examining the history of a representative language from each of two TB branches in Northeast India, analytic Boro (Boro-Garo) and synthetic Lai (Kuki-Chin), suggests a possible sociolinguistic explanation for these tendencies. Trudgill and others have suggested that the tendency to develop and maintain strongly analytic grammatical patterns is associated with "exoteric" languages spoken by large populations, and regularly used to communicate with outsiders, while the development and maintenance of morphological complexity is characteristic of "esoteric" languages spoken by small communities and used only to communicate with other native speakers. This paper presents Boro-Garo and Kuki-Chin as exemplifying these tendencies.
Indian English: Features and Sociolinguistic Aspects
Language and Linguistics Compass, 2012
Indian English has been the subject of study since colonial times, with several works written over the years describing its linguistic features. Considerable attention has been paid to the lexis, morphology and syntactic constructions, as also the sound system. Yet, the investigation is far from over, nor is there agreement on issues. Recent work has moved in the direction of corpus-based studies, enabling the establishment of tendencies and grammaticalised forms in a quantified manner. Acoustic phonetic studies are increasingly the norm. These empirically verified conclusions either negate or confirm earlier intuition-based and impressionistic descriptions. Together, these works help to establish what makes up the national variety, the standard and variation. Two theoretical debates emerge in this scenario. The first is the nature and extent of substrate influence and its intersection with L2 universals. The second is a debate on the phase to which Indian English belongs in Schneider's dynamic model of evolution for New Englishes: phase 3 of nativisation or phase 4 of endonormative stabilisation.
The usage of contemporary Tamil
Tamil-Socio Linguistics, 2019
The history of Tamil language is of a pretty long period. This language was patronized by the three Sangams; it has been origin of many languages, and the most ancient language and among the living languages in the world; and now in the twenty first century, through delayed, it has been recognized as a classical language. It is quit nature, when people speak to the people of a different speech community they use code mix. The object of this research paper is to study and describe as to how change in language or code mix in the use of the people crop up from time to time, to identify with a historical basis the words of other languages that are prevalent in modern Tamil, and to find the opportunity to improve the vocabulary by coining new words for the scientific and social needs particularly for the new inventions. The Language in the Beginning The first treatise or book now available to us is only a grammar book. It treats the usages of words and prescribes the rules of the language. Tholkapiyam tells that people of our country were multilingual, and hence the lexis in Tamil were categorically given as iyarcol, tiricol, ticaicol, and vadacol. May foreign words have been borrowed to Tamil. Moreover, a language will have same changes from time to time, and after certain period, some words may be archaic, so the people of modern period have to depend on the commentary given by the commentators to read and learn the literature of Sangam period. The words used by the administrators The foreign invasions, aggrandizements, domination of other milers seriously affected the people from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, their language, their culture, etc, during the region of the Mohals, the Portiguese, the French, the British, the language of people attained a mixed one. Even after years have passed, the vocabulary borrowed from urban, Portiguse, French and English have become the part of our fridian language in general and of Tamil in particular.
A Case for the Standardization of Indian English (2017)
Indian Literature 61(1) 297 Jan-Feb, 2017
In this paper I consider the status of Indian English as a variety whose standard varieties are either British English or American English and show how this status forces it to position itself as a minor language without a major language, or as a variation of standard variety major languages which do not accord it the position of minority. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of major and minor languages, and Harris’s conception of language as a set of constraints, I show how having nationalistically defined foreign standards make Indian English both dependent on foreign sources to derive authenticity as well as limit its creative possibilities as a minor language by making its power of variation illegitimate. As a solution to this crisis I propose the recognition and standardization of an acculturated variety of Indian English.