The local government has been trying to improve Tamil's status. I must use the words 'right', 'left' and 'straight'," he says.
SPOKEN ENGLISH TAMIL TRANSLATION DRIVER
"So today if I tell my driver 'turn right' in Tamil, he will not understand. He says you can't even give directions to a local cab driver without using English. Ramakrishnan worries that people in Tamil Nadu-especially the poorly educated-know neither English nor Tamil very well, and get by only with a limited mash-up of the two. English is infiltrating everyday life too. "Shakalaka baby, shakalakababy, will you fall in love with me?"īut it's not just pop culture. Sadanand Menon rolls his eyes as he recalls choruses like this: But there's no such impulse for Indian Tamils, who got their own state within India in 1969: Tamil Nadu.īesides, now they're hungry for something else: English.Įnglish words are scattered across Tamil movies and songs. Now it's a fully-functioning modern language-and classical Hebrew is a different animal altogether.Īrguably it took the building of a nation to produce such a radical shift. It couldn't describe the modern world either. That's reminiscent of the challenge Hebrew faced at the turn of the 20th century. Tamil has got locked in the past and hasn't found a device to describe what is happening around them at the moment," he says. "So like if we were discussing this instrument that you're holding, in Tamil, then just about everything that is part of your radio equipment-recorder, your microphone, your earphones–for everything I'll have to use English words. Menon says that after the British left India, local politicians used the centuries-old classical Tamil of epics and royalty to define a proud regional identity. He argues that Tamil has become lost in a sense of nostalgia which does not enable it to be a modern language. Sadanand Menon is a well-known writer in Chennai. "The reason he says this is because subconsciously he thinks if he writes it should conform to the classical standards." Ask someone to try and they'll respond, "'Oh no, I can't write Tamil'," says Ramakrishnan. Tamil shares that feature with several other languages, notably Arabic.įor many, writing in Tamil can be off-putting. Written Tamil is different to the spoken Tamil people use every day. All those millions of people aren't going to suddenly stop speaking Tamil anytime soon. That's not to say Tamil is an endangered language. The last grammar was written in the 12th century," he says. "We don't have a comprehensive grammar of modern Tamil. Ramakrishnan is a man on a mission: to standardize modern Tamil. Ramakrishnan in Chennai, formerly known as Madras. In south India at least, Tamil is at a crossroads. It's used by more than 60 million Indians, about the same as the entire population of France.Īnother 10 million speak a different form of the language in Sri Lanka. Tamil is one of 22 official languages in India, and the fifth most widely spoken language in the country.