Distribution

SOUTH INDIA, SRI LANKA, SINGAPORE, Malaysia, Indonesia, East and South Africa, Mauritius, Burma, Vietnam, Guyana, the Caribbean; there are Tamil-speaking communities in many other parts of the world.

Introduction

Many of the problems faced by speakers of Dravidian languages when they learn English are shared with speakers of other South Asian languages. For details of these, see pages 227–243. However, Dravidian languages are agglutinative languages, like Turkish; they differ radically in their phonology, morphology and syntax from the Indo-European languages of the subcontinent, and have correspondingly less in common with English than these languages. Speakers of Dravidian languages therefore encounter a number of additional problems when learning English. This chapter deals with the English of Tamil-speaking learners, but the points made are generally valid for speakers of other Dravidian languages.

Phonology

Vowels

The Tamil vowel system consists of five pairs of short and long vowels: /Λ/, /ɑ/; /i/, /iː/; /e/, /eː/; /o/, /oː/, /u/, /uː/.

All the vowels are undiphthongised, though raised or lowered in context. The two vowels /oː/ (a pure close rounded short vowel) and /oː/ (the long equivalent) have no close counterparts in standard British English, though similar vowels occur in Scottish, Irish and other regional varieties.

There are two diphthongs: /ai/ (like the vowel in buy) and /a℧/ (like the vowel in cow).