The Confessions of a Standardizer.

Since I have actually written a book called A Grammar of Spoken Tamil it might be of some use to reveal what things were in the back of my head when I did it. That is, did I simply record what I had found, or did I make decisions in favor of one of two competing alternatives in a capricious and prejudicial way? And did the decisions I made help to perpetuate linguistic inequality and the hegemony and privilege of a particular class of Tamil speakers? Or did I simply ratify the existing situation, namely, that standardization has already taken place, and all I have done is to describe it?

1.

Regularity. Most of the time, my concern was with regularity, with finding what patterns repeated themselves in the grammar of SST, and stating this. When competing alternatives existed, I chose the one that seemed to be close to what I in general heard non-Brahmans use. Thus a time-expression marker such as Verb+ pootu meaning `when (X) verb-s' can occur either as irukkr-appa, irukkr-appo, or irukkr-appam where the -am portion is actually a nasalized [õ]. The LT form of this would be more likely irukkum pootu and some speakers would use this to disambiguate their speech, if some other speaker didn't understand irukkr-appa, irukkr-appo, or irukkr-appam. In fact, this rule of thumb (``Disambiguate by using LT, or something close to it"), is a fairly useful one; all literate Tamilians use it, although some feel that they should use it all the time. Thus the LT-like irukkum poodu, with a nasalized [u] to tell us it's spoken, not LT, is also a feature of SST; it is not a totally `natural' thing for the spoken language, but it is used. In fact other things like it are also used, which means that it is a kind of `elaborated style' in the Basil Bernsteinian sense of the word; it is neither SST nor LT. It is perhaps akin to what speakers of French sometimes do, i.e. spell out a word, to disambiguate it: il lui faut la mer, m-e-r. `He needs the sea (not his mother)'; Chinese speakers are also known to finger-spell Chinese characters in the air or on their hands to disambiguate certain things.

2.

Pedagogy. Since my goal with my grammar was to provide something that was pedagogically useful for second-language learners of Tamil, and since literate Tamilians invoke literary forms in case of doubt, I also chose to do so when it made certain things more simple pedagogically. For example, the present-tense marker for all `strong' verbs in Tamil is kkr and for weak verbs it is r: paar+kkr+een `see-present-1st.sg', i.e. I see' poo-r-een `go-pres-1st' `I go'. This is so for all verbs except the copula iru, which has a present-tense marker kk only iru-kk-een `be-pres-1st' I am'. However, since this verb has a LT form with LT kkir like any other verb, I chose to not make an issue of this point except as a footnote, when discussing iru in particular. That is, no one will fail to understand irukkreen when they themselves say irukkeen, and students are burdened with one less rule.

On the other hand, iru also has an ``irregular" neuter singular form; the LT form is irukkiratu but the spoken form is just irukku. Some speakers do produce a form irukkutu [irukkudu] but a more LT-like irukkradu would be a step beyond that. Since irukku is the most common, I chose to list it as such; if they encounter irukkutu they will understand it. Here frequency of use took precedence over regularity or whatever. For literate Tamilians, the LT variety always comes first, and they can always consult the grammar of LT in their heads if they have questions; for them, SST should always defer to LT, and be based on it. Such a viewpoint does not allow for the possibility that a foreigner might not have a grammar of LT in her head to consult in moments of doubt. On the other hand, the second-language learner of Tamil must at some point confront the fact of the grammar of LT, since it is culturally expected and is sometimes useful to know; in any event all reference works, practically, are written about LT. A person writing a grammar of Spoken Tamil cannot ignore the existence of LT, even though American linguistics may tell him that literary languages are irrelevant. One must find a golden mean, between the structure of the spoken language, and the structure, some of it quite identical and useful, of LT. Tamil is a diglossic language (Britto 1986), and this fact must be acknowledged; what linguistics, structural or theoretical or whatever, must also admit is that in a diglossic language, the spoken variety is strongly influenced by the literary variety. This fact is inescapable; it is well-nigh oppressive. But the spoken language also has life and juice and zing that the literary variety does not possess, i.e. it has an authentic vitality, a life of its own that is often lacking in the stultified norms of LT.

3.

Simplicity. Another criterion we value in linguistics is that of simplicity; we are taught that linguistic descriptions are best if simple, and that simplicity, when found in a language, should be preserved. When one is forced to have to learn both the rules of LT and SST, it is simplest if one can learn them in a way that proceeds simply from one set to the other. This criterion underlies some of the decisions made above, such as the choice of kkr as the present-tense marker for iru even though it is more commonly kk. At an earlier period I would have castigated myself for giving in to the rules of LT, but since life is short, whatever is simplest is best.

4.

Stigmatized forms. As mentioned above, SST, though itself stigmatized from above by LT, also has forms it does not accept. Those that are neither vulgar nor obscene, but still need to be dealt with, are things like the rounding of e and i between an initial labial consonant and a following retroflex (usually) consonant already mentioned, or the deocclusion of NC to [nn] in some places. In such cases, I am forced to choose whichever form is most acceptable, but which leads to a funny kind of irregularity already noted: ponnu `girl' is acceptable, but (v)uutu `house' is not; (v)uuttle `in the house' however is. This is no problem for the student who does not know LT; for students knowing LT it seems strange that the rounding has proceeded irregularly through the lexicon. To the variationist it is simply evidence of a sound-change in process.

5.

Abstractness. Another decision already alluded to is that one of the differences between LT and ST is the apparently deletion of certain final consonants in SST, such as final laterals and rhotics, and the nasalization of final vowels. If one were to be perfectly true and phonetic about this, one would state that SST and LT differ in the presence and or absence of these sounds, but this is over simplifying. In fact, most of these laterals are only absent when the word/morpheme in question occurs before pause; but if anything is added, such as case, or clitics, or interrogative markers, the sound is not deleted. Thus the LT form vantaal `if X comes' has a spoken analog vandaa. but if anything is added, such as um `even', then both forms are identical: vantaal-um and vandaal-um `even if X comes'. Thus the `underlying' or `base' forms of many morphemes in SST will be the same as in LT; what will differ is that in final position, before pause, certain consonants can (and will) be deleted.

Thus I have, in the interests of simplicity and regularity and the other criteria linguists generally use, made decisions about what form or other is `standard', even in cases where variation in the language may exist. This is, I think, no violation of anybody's rights, nor does it do any injustice to the language. No Tamilian ever tells me they can't understand the forms I use; I never have trouble making myself understood on the telephone (where people can't see my face and therefore don't expect me to be speaking English); all the forms I have chosen are in fact used by somebody though there is perhaps no one individual who speaks exactly the way I have described the language. Thus it is perhaps the case that there is no native speaker of SST yet, and everybody still speaks their local dialect most of the time, reserving SST for inter-caste, inter-regional communication. As long as people are closely bound in kinship systems, this will certainly mean that special caste-related kin terms will be used that cannot be used by all castes (there is no word for `wife' that is not caste-bound.) Perhaps then only foreigners will speak SST, or Singaporeans.

This brings me to my last point; I find that in general, Singapore spoken Tamil (at least that variety still learned at home as a native language, i.e. not the variety learned only at school) is more or less congruent with SST; the few things I notice that are different are a tendency to use more LT-like forms than TN Tamils would use. Singaporeans say perroorkal for `parents', whereas Tamilians in TN would say appaa-mmaa; Singaporeans say muunru for `three' instead of SST muunu and there are some other hypercareful forms I hear; but aside from the occasional Malay word, I do not notice great differences, i.e. I cannot tell from a Singaporean's Tamil (unless he says the two words above) whether s/he is Singapore-born or TN born, but I can tell from his/her English.