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The question of
whether there exists a variety of spoken Tamil that is `standard' is a
somewhat difficult issue. Many linguistic scholars have approached
the issue and have various conclusions to offer; the concensus seems
to be that a standard spoken Tamil, if it does not already exist, is
at least `emerging' and can be described as that variety that one
hears used in the Tamil `social' film, and on the radio and in the
production of `social' dramas, both live and on radio and television;
it is the variety that emerges when speakers of various local and
social dialects meet in college and university hostels in Tamilnadu
and must, perhaps for the first time in their lives, speak a variety
of Tamil that is understandable to other Tamils from vastly different
parts of Tamilnadu. An attempt to be comprehensible to the largest
number of speakers means avoiding regionalisms, caste-specific forms,
rustic or vulgar forms, or anything stereotypical of a particular
place or community. In recent years this kind of inter-caste,
inter-regional dialect has most typically resembled higher-caste,
educated speech of non-Brahman groups in Tamilnadu; according to some
it is neither from the far north (i.e. Madras) or from the far
southern reaches of Tamilnadu (e.g. Kanniyakumari District), but
rather from urban areas in the more `central' districts of Tamilnadu,
such as Thanjavur, Trichy, or Madurai. In cases of doubt as to
whether a form is acceptable or not, speakers apparently tend to lean
more toward Literary Tamil, and may choose a form that is not actually
found in any spoken regional or social dialect, but is known from
Literary Tamil. Since Literary Tamil is the form that all educated
speakers know, it can be a repository from which general forms can be
chosen; this is another aspect of what Labov's maxim (1971:450)
according to which non-standard languages in contact with a standard
one will vary in the direction of the standard. Here it is not in a
formal context, but in a context of avoiding stigmatization.
For example, speakers may model their choice of the past neuter form
of verbs on the Literary Tamil past atu [adu], e.g. vant - atu
[vand-adu], rather than the form found very commonly in many
non-Brahman dialects, i.e. [-cci] or [-ccu], e.g. [vandu-cci] `it
came.' (which is not found per se in Literary Tamil with this verb,
but has spread from Class 3 verbs, or from the prototypical pasts in
- 66u of verbs like poo [poo] `go' and aaku [aa(hu)] `become',
which have spoken pasts [pooccu] and [aaccu] (from Literary Tamil
pooyi66u and aayi66u , respectively.) Other speakers may choose
the [ccu/i] forms unequivocally, so that no hard and fast rules can be
given for many forms.
In fact though we conclude that while some concensus does exist as to
what spoken Tamil entails, the situation must be described as being
extremely variable and fluid. Individual speakers may vary
considerably, even in their own speech, depending upon whom they are
talking to, or what the topic of conversation is. These phenomena
have been noted by many linguists working in the field of
sociolinguistics, and are not limited to Tamil. Speakers may vary
depending on social characteristics such as their place of birth,
their community of origin, their level of education, their
socio-economic status, their sex (male vs. female), their age, their
occupation, and any other social markers one may isolate.
Given this kind of fluidity, we have made our own decisions about what
form might be given that would be acceptable to most speakers, forms
that would be neutral as to most social characteristics (except that
it would not be typically Brahman, nor from the lowest non-Brahman
usage.) This is based on our own observations of Tamil usage, and in
particular from close study of the Tamil film and the Tamil radio
play.
Next: Transliteration.
Up: Deep Background: an English
Previous: Sources of data
Harold Schiffman
Thu Apr 2 08:48:57 EST 1998