Tamil

How to spell tamil

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tamil

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tamil mean?

1. nounA Dravidian language of southern India and Sri Lanka, or a member of the people who speak it.

Tamil in a sentence

• The museum exhibit explained how tamil became one of the world's oldest classical languages.

• She learned to read tamil from her grandmother before moving abroad.

Where does tamil come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word comes directly from the language's own name for itself, written Tamiḻ in the Tamil script, the name of one of the oldest living Dravidian languages of southern India and Sri Lanka. The exact origin of the native term is debated among scholars, though it has been connected to older forms such as Tamiḻakam, the name for the ancient Tamil-speaking homeland, and possibly to a root suggesting 'one's own speech' or 'sweet, natural language'. It is closely related historically to the older literary name Dravida, from which the whole language family takes its label, and some linguists trace Tamiḻ and Dravida back to a shared earlier form. English adopted the spelling Tamil during the colonial period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when British administrators and missionaries in India transliterated the name using Roman letters. The spelling trap for English writers is the final '-il' ending, which is easy to render as '-el' or '-le', and the single 'm', since the unstressed second syllable gives little phonetic guidance.

How the word is built

• Tamil (a self-designation of the language and people; not analysable into prefix-root-suffix in English)