Sri Lanka Gypsy Telugu: A Dravidian Dialect from Sri Lanka's Sinhalese Heartland

Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil, a dialect of Tamil from coastal Sri Lanka spoken by bilingual Catholic fishermen, exhibits many features of contact-induced change. Based on data collected in the Negombo area during 2000 and 2001, I conclude that Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil has undergone significant amounts of borrowing and grammatical realignment under the influence of Colloquial Sinhala, an unusual instance of South Asian contact-induced change in the direction from Dravidian to Indo-Aryan. This has likely been conditioned by the Catholic religion of the Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil– speaking community within a predominantly Buddhist and Hindu society.

1972

Recently there was a controversy among the Ceylon linguists, writers and teachers on the use of colloquial style in literary works. The history of this controversy is worthy of notice. For many centuries, there has been an active relationship between the Ceylon Tamil scholars and their counterparts in Tamil Nadu. Ceylon Tamil scholars like Arumuka Navalar, Thamotharam Pillai, Kathiravel Pillai, Swami Vipulananda, were honoured in Tamil Nadu. Swami Vipulananda was highly honoured for his scholarship by being offered the Chair of Tamil in Annamalai University. He was privileged not only to be the first Tamil to become a Professor of Tamil at Annamalai University, but also to be the first Ceylonese to hold that post. Indian Tamil scholars have always been welcomed in Ceylon. The relationship that existed was so much related that the Ceylonese began calling the South Indian Tamil territory as ta:yna:tu ('mother land') and Ceylon Tamil territory as se:yna:tu (child's land). Until the middle part of this century, Ceylon Tamils consciously or unconsciously have thought that their 'mother land' is Tamil Nadu. But during the mid-fifties of this century, Ceylon Tamils began to recognize that Ceylon is their homeland and the struggle for their language rights in the island strengthened this national feeling. Ceylon scholars began to think in terms of 'Ceylon tradition' 'here in this place' and says: "The voiceless velar stop is palatalised into 'c' on account of the front high unrounded vowel ". We are not told whether this is a general feature in the dialect or it applies only in this instance. His paper contains many statements of this sort, which, although they have the appearance of general statements, are in fact not so. Zvelebil was the first to make an attempt to describe all the major dialects of Ceylon Tamil. Since he had attempted to do this task in a short paper, there is a possibility for him to confuse a feature of one dialect with that of the

The Telugu language is usually described to contain two rhotic consonants, viz., alveolar tap (sādurēpha) and alveolar trill (śakaṭarēpha). Modern linguists reconstruct alveolar trill [ṟ] to be a reflex of an original alveolar stop */ṯ/, but there is some linguistic evidence for reconstructing not one, but two separate phonemes for explaining the origin of the words involving alveolar trill. In Telugu, while these two rhotic consonants (tap and trill) appeared to have merged during the Middle Telugu period, the traditional Telugu grammarians attempted to maintain a normative contrast using the wordlists based on the attestations from older literature. However, a great confusion and uncertainty in the determination of this contrast led to several controversies over the last five hundred years. Surprisingly, none of the traditional grammarians attempted to utilize the data from the neighboring literary languages such as Kannada and Tamil in resolving such challenges. In this paper, I attempt to survey the history of various Telugu grammatical descriptions of the rhotic contrast, and analyze the accuracy of such descriptions in the light of comparative linguistic evidence from various languages of the Dravidian linguistic family. Based on this analysis, I venture to propose that some of the common words with alveolar trill, in fact, belong to a pre-Dravidian substratum.

Grammatical concepts in Traditional Tamil grammars and in other Dravidian languages

No findings and discoveries are as important to comprehend the origin and history of Roma as the elucidation of their linguistic connection with India. For exploring the link between Romani Chib and Indian languages, it is imperative to understand the historical background of Roma. There are two historically significant events which dispel the myths attached to origin and postulate the link between India and Roma.

The Tamil variety spoken by the Hebbar Iyengar community of Karnataka (henceforth ‘Hebbar Tamil’ or ‘HT’) is a minority language variety (no reliable statistics; unofficial estimates ~ 50,000 speakers) traditionally spoken in southern Karnataka, where the majority of community members still reside. Based on community legends that describe their out-migration from Srirangam town in present-day Tamil Nadu and subsequent settlement in and around Melukote town in present-day Karnataka, it is hypothesised that Hebbar Tamil split from Middle Tamil (the basis for Literary Tamil or ‘LT’) around the 13th century AD. This has meant that HT has developed independently of modern Spoken Tamil (ST) in Tamil Nadu. *** HT has been most significantly influenced by standard Kannada, which is the majority language spoken in the community’s traditional areas of residence. However, Kannada influence on the language has remained largely lexical; the core vocabulary of HT including function words and pronouns, person-number-gender (PNG) and tense-aspect-mood (TAM) markers remain perceptibly of Tamil origin. That said, pronouns and grammatical markers in HT have indeed undergone some degree of phonetic change, such that they are no longer identical to their counterparts in modern ST. *** This paper will compare and contrast pronouns and PNG-TAM markers in HT with those in LT and ST. This will include, among other things, a comparison of the divergent evolution of LT word-final nasal stops on pronouns and grammatical markers in HT and ST, e.g. (i) LT <nāṉ> --> ST /nãː/, HT /naːnʉ/ ‘I’, but (ii) LT <pōkirēṉ>  ST /poːrɛ̃ː/, HT /poːreː/ ‘I go’ *** It will also discuss the concept of surface and underlying forms, namely the variation in phonetic forms of a grammatical marker with and without morphological suffixes, e.g. (i) LT <paṇṇukiṟāṉ> --> ST [pɐɳɳʉrɑ̃ː], HT [pɐɳɳʉrʊ] ‘he does’, but (ii) LT <paṇṇukiṟāṉā> --> ST [pɐɳɳʉrɑːnɑː], HT [pɐɳɳʉrɑːnɑː] ‘does he do?’

1999

Tamil and other South Dravidian languages are somewhat unique in that they possess three phonological contrasts in the area of what are usually referred to as r-like segments (continuants, trills, flaps, etc.) as well as two contrasts in the lateral area. Because of an unfortunate lack of uniformity in the transcriptional systems that have been used to describe these segments, and because of other tendencies that are difficult to group under one rubric, the question of what is an "r" and what is not an "r" has been historically unclear. It is the goal of this paper to attempt to clear up the question of both the phonetics and the phonology of continuants and laterals in Tamil and to some extent in the other South Dravidian languages that have similar contrasts.

Asia-Pacific Linguistics Open Access, 2014

2012. New Delhi, Cambridge University Press India (Hardcover, 404 + xvii pp.; ISBN: 978-81-7596-930-8).

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Negombo Fishermen's Tamil (NFT), a dialect of Tamil from coastal Sri Lanka spoken by bilingual Catholic fishermen, exhibits many features of contactinduced change. Based on data collected in the Negombo area during 2000 and 2001,