Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T09:07:40.376Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Standardization or restandardization: The case for “Standard” Spoken Tamil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

Harold F. Schiffman
Harold F. Schiffman
Affiliation:
South Asian Regional Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305, haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Tamil language has had its current standard written form since the 13th century; but because of 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. Because 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 is to examine the concept of “language standardization” as it has been applied to other languages, focusing on the role of literacy and writing in this process; then to present evidence for, as well as the sources of, koinæization of "Standard Spoken Tamil"; and then to determine whether SST is in fact an emergent standard, given the challenges of literacy and writing. (Standardization, Tamil, diglossia, linguae francae, koinés)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , June 1998 , pp. 359 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Andronov, Mixail S. (1962). Razgovonyj tamil'skij jazyk i ego dialekty [Spoken Tamil language and its dialects.] Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar
Andronov, Mixail S. (1975). Problems of the national language in Tamilnad Anthropos 70:180–93.Google Scholar
Arden, A. H. (1954). A progressive grammar of common Tamil. Madras: Christian Literature Society.Google Scholar
Arokianathan, S. (1981). Tamil clitics. Trivandrum: Dravidian Linguistics Association.Google Scholar
Asher, Ronald E. (1982). Tamil. (Lingua descriptive studies, 7.) Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
Britto, Francis (1986). Diglossia: A study of the theory with application to Tamil. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Crowley, Tony (1989). Standard English and the politics of language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Eastman, Carol (1983). Language planning: An introduction. San Francisco: Chandler & Sharp.Google Scholar
Fabricius, Johann Philip (1910). A dictionary, Tamil and English. Tranquebar: Evangelical Lutheran Mission Publishing House. [Reprinted, 1972.]Google Scholar
Garvin, Paul (1964).The standard language problem: Concepts and methods. In Hymes, Dell (ed.), Language in culture and Society, 521–26. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Giles, Howard, & Smith, Philip (1979). Accommodation theory: Optimal levels of convergence. In Giles, H. and Clair, Robert St. (eds.), Language and social psychology, 45–65. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Goody, Jack (1987). The interface between the written and the oral. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Haugen, Einar (1972). Language planning in modern Norway. In his The ecology of language, 133–47. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Jernudd, Björn, & Ibrahim, M. H. (1986). Aspects of Arabic sociolinguistics: Introduction. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 61:5–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joseph, John Earl (1987). Eloquence and power: The rise of language standards and standard languages. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kachru, Braj (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the Outer Circle. In Quirk, Randolph & Widdowson, H. G. (eds.), English in the world, 11–30. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Milroy, James, & Milroy, Lesley (1991). Authority in language: Investigating language prescription and standardisation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Terence F. (1985). Sociolinguistic and stylistic dimensions of the Educated Spoken Arabic of Egypt and the Levant. In Woods, J. Douglas (ed.), Language standards and their codification: Process and application. (Exeter linguistic studies, 9), 42–57. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Terence F. (1986). What is Educated Spoken Arabic? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 61:7–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pakir, Anne (1994). Education and invisible language planning: The case of English in Singapore. In Kandiah, Thiru & Kwan-Terry, John (eds.), English and language planning: A Southeast Asian contribution, 158–81., Singapore: Centre for Advanced Studies, National University of Singapore.Google Scholar
Phillipson, Robert (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pillai, Shanmugam (1960). Tamil, literary and colloquial. In Ferguson, Charles & Gumperz, John (eds.), Linguistic diversity in South Asia International Journal of American Linguistics 26:3, part 3, 27–42. Bloomington: Indiana University.Google Scholar
Schiffman, Harold (1979). A grammar of Spoken Tamil. Madras: Christian Literature Society.Google Scholar
Schiffman, Harold (1991). Swiss-German diglossia. In Hudson, Albert (ed.), Studies in diglossia (Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10:1), 173–88.Google Scholar
Schiffman, Harold (1996). Linguistic culture and language policy. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffman, Harold, & Arokianathan, S. (1986). Diglossic variation in Tamil film and fiction. In Krishnamurti, Bh. et al. (eds.), South Asian languages: Structure, convergence, and diglossia, 371–81. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.Google Scholar
Staal, Frits. (1986). The fidelity of oral tradition and the origins of science. (Mededelingen der koniklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, afd. Letterkunde, nieuwe reeks, 49:8.) Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
Walters, Keith (1996). Gender, identity, and the political economy of language: Anglophone wives in Tunisia. Language in Society 25:515–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zvelebil, Kamil (1959–1963). Dialects of Tamil. Archív Orientální 27:272–317, 572–603, 28:414–56, 31:635–68.Google Scholar