Standardization or Restandardization: the case for `Standard' Spoken Tamil

Harold F. Schiffman
Luce Professor of Language Learning
South Asian Regional Studies
Williams Hall Box 6305 University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Abstract

The Tamil language has had its current standard written form since the thirteenth century, but due to an increasing diglossia, spoken Tamil dialects have now diverged so radically from earlier norms, including the written standard (LT, or Literary Tamil) that no spoken dialect (regional or social) can function as the koiné or lingua franca. Since LT is never used for authentic informal oral communication between live speakers, there has always been a need for some sort of spoken `standard' koiné for inter-dialect communication. Aside from interpersonal communication, one hears this inter-dialect koiné most clearly in the so-called ``social" film, which arose out of its antecedent, the popular or ``social" drama. Conversational portions of novels and short-stories also exhibit spoken forms, though not always as clearly `phonetic' 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, focussing on the role of literacy and writing on this process; then evidence for, as well as the sources of, koinéization of `Standard Spoken Tamil' will be presented; then we will determine whether the thesis that SST is an emergent standard is in fact sustainable, given the challenges of literacy and writing.

(Indexing: standardization, Tamil, diglossia, linguae francae, koinés)