Background

The Tamil language has the second-longest history of standardization in South Asia, having been codified by Tolkappiyanar in the early centuries of the Common Era; it has changed radically over time and subsequent standard written forms have evolved, the most recent being the codification by the grammarian Pavanandi in the thirteenth century. Due to an increasing diglossia, spoken Tamil dialects have now diverged so radically from each other, and from the written standard (LT, or Literary Tamil) that there are problems of mutual intelligibility between many Tamil dialects. We will not even begin here to deal with the lack of intelligibility between Indian Tamil and the extremely divergent Sri Lanka Tamil dialects. Since LT is never used for informal oral communication between live speakers, some sort of spoken koiné has filled this gap, and been in use for centuries, though it is not always clear retrospectively what the linguistic features of this koiné were or have been. It used to be the case that the Brahman dialect of Tamil was once the koiné used for inter-caste and inter-regional communication, but in this century this dialect has been replaced by another, non-Brahman dialect. The domain most clearly dominated by this koiné is the so-called ``social" film, which arose out of another domain, the popular or ``social" drama. Conversational portions of novels and short-stories also exhibit spoken language forms, though these are not always as clearly representative of a basilectal phonetic spoken Tamil of the non-Brahman koiné as a phonetician might expect. The goal of this paper will be to examine the concept of `language standardization' as it has been applied to other languages, examine the conditions under which a fairly uniform Tamil spoken koiné (SST) evolved, then present evidence for standardization features of SST, and then determine whether the thesis that SST is an emergent standard is in fact viable.