This is a reference grammar of the standard spoken variety of Tamil, a language with 65 million speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore. The spoken variety is radically different from the standard literary variety, last standardized in the thirteenth century. The standard spoken language is used by educated people in their interactions with people from different regions and different social groups, and is also the dialect used in films, plays and the media. This book, a much expanded version of the author's Grammar of Spoken Tamil (1979), is the first such grammar to contain examples both in Tamil script and in transliteration, and the first to be written so as to be accessible to students studying the modern spoken language as well as to linguists and other specialists. The book has benefited from extensive native-speaker input and the author's own long experience of teaching Tamil to English-speakers.
Papers from a 2003 conference in Pennsylvania have been updated and augmented with papers by other linguists and scholars of Central Asia to explore past and present language policy in the region. Amo
This short volume provides a comprehensive and synoptic view of Joshua A. Fishman's contributions to international sociolinguistics from 1949 to the present. Readers will find in this volume the essen
