Tamil at U of T
- Tamil is one of the Dravidian Languages spoken in Tamil Nadu of South India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius and South Africa. It is spoken in the Diaspora of Tamil people throughout North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
- Tamil is a geographically widespread Indian language spoken by 70 million people worldwide.
- This is one of the ancient classical languages with great literary and grammatical traditions. It has the history of over 2800 years. Tamil is the progenitor of many languages in the Dravidian Family of languages. Tamil is considered to be the oldest language of all Dravidian languages. Many scholars believe that the Indus Valley civilization spoke a Dravidian Language.
- Language unites diverse Tamil population of the countries in the Diaspora and Tamil plays an essential role in the Diaspora in fostering unified identity and to maintain Tamil culture.
- Learning Tamil would help one to know about other culture in context for education, cross – cultural engagement and research.. Tamil has a rich ancient cultural tradition. This can be explored by visiting the countries where Tamil is spoken and fostered.
Is Tamil hard to learn?
- Tamil language is being taught and learnt as a mother tongue and other tongue in different parts of the world for a number of years
- Tamil is being taught in the U.S, U.K, Russia, Germany, France, Czech Republic etc as a second language for many years.
- In Canada, Tamil is being taught in schools as an International subject and as a high school credit course. Thousands of students are enrolled in these programs.
- Tamil is purely a phonetic language. It has only 30 letters and a few secondary symbols from which letter formation is made phonetically. Not like English and other languages, Tamil letters do not carry unrelated sounds word to word.
- Morphological structure can be explained by rules to make one to learn language with logical rules
- Tamil is a highly diglossic language. However, learning spoken Tamil from written Tamil is simple by learning some structured phonetic rules.
NEW213Y1Y
Introduction to Tamil 104L
Intended for students with little or no knowledge of written Tamil. Intensive introduction to phonology and grammar; syntax of the modern Tamil language; emphasis on basic writing and reading.
Exclusion: High school Tamil.
- Tamil Studies Conference at U of T.
For event details: www.tamilstudiesconference.ca
