Tracing the Linguistic Crossroads Between Malay and Tamil

Speakers of Malay and Tamil have been in intermittent contact for roughly two millennia, yet extant academic work on the resultant processes of contact, lexical borrowing, and language mixing at the interface of these two speech communities has only exposed the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This paper presents an historical overview of language contact between Malay and Tamil through time and across the Bay of Bengal. It concludes with a call for future studies on the lexicology, dialectology, and use of colloquial language of both Malay and Tamil varieties

User acceptance of Tamil technology in postcolonial Tamil Nadu

Technology has made considerable advancements over the last few decades. With over 70 million native speakers, Tamil could be classified as a world language. There have been researches specifically on the attitude of native Tamil speakers towards Tamil language and within the domain of Tamil computing. The predominantly native Tamil speaking regions of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry within the Indian Union, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia have had a colonial past. This research paper aims to present an empirical observation on the colonial influences towards user acceptance of technology in Tamil through a quantitative methodology and attempts to present the prevailing mindset of Tamil speakers and argues how it might influence the user acceptance of technology or software in Tamil which is the original contribution of this paper. This research paper uses the philosophical approach towards technology in the context of postcolonial Tamil Nadu to explore the acceptance of technology in the Tamil language

The language studies of Indian ethnic in Malaysia.

Majority of the Indian ethnic in Malaysia who emigrated from India are Tamil speakers.This ethnic is greatly diversified internally in various aspects such as language,religion,social status,education,caste,even from the origin of homeland,either the poor Tamil laborer originated from Southern India or the English educated Tamil from Sri Lanka.This paper intends to look into the language issue of Malaysia Indian by investigating three different generations so as to indicate the changes in language use.It is found that Tamil language is still the most widely used language in the community or family.Though,the usage of English language,and even Malay language are in the growth which may be replacing Tamil language in the near future.With the changes in the language attitude,the language maintenance of Tamil is hardly optimistic

Final revised proposal to encode the Saurashtra script in the UCS

This is a proposal to encode the Saurashtra in the international character encoding standard Unicode. The script was published in Unicode Standard version 5.1 in March 2008. The Saurashtra script has been used to write the Saurashtra language, which is spoken in southern India. The language is today most often written in the Tamil script, but since the end of the 19c has been written with the Telugu, Tamil, Devanagari and Saurashtra scripts

Language choice of Malaysian Tamil students in Facebook: a case study in a Malaysian university

Language is a powerful identity of an ethnic group. It is with difficulty that a minority group maintains its mother tongue in a multilingual society, particularly so when other languages such as Malay, English and Chinese have economic advantages over Tamil. Even though in Malaysia Tamil language is taught in primary schools for children aged 7 to 12 and in secondary schools for the students aged 13 to 18, only a few continue to study this language in their higher education. It is a challenge for the educators in higher education institutes to encourage and attract students to study Tamil and is equally challenging to encourage them to maintain Tamil language in their daily conversations. The main aim of this study is to identify the language used in Facebook communication among the Malaysian Tamil students in the university. Reasons for their language choice and some strategies to maintain the usage of Tamil language in social networking platform are also discussed in this paper. Students aged 22 to 24 from a university in the central region of Peninsular Malaysia which offers Tamil studies, are chosen as the participants of this study. The participants were interviewed for their language choice. The finding shows that the participants with excellent Tamil language competency, used code mixing, Romanised Tamil more than Tamil or Tamil script in Facebook communication. This study found a way to make the participants converse solely in Tamil. An altered language behaviour in cyberspace emerging out of unknown consideration, was thwarted and normal language use was restored

INFLUENTIAL FACTORS IN THE MAINTENANCE OF TAMIL LANGUAGE AMONG INDIAN SOCIETIES IN MEDAN, NORTH SUMATERA

The research is aimed at finding out the influential factors in the maintenance of Tamil language among Indian societies in Medan North Sumatera, It is used descriptive research by using qualitative and quantitative approach. It describes the maintenance of Tamil language among Indian speakers who lived in Medan North Sumatera. The research was conducted in Medan North Sumatera. Methods in collecting data were observation, questionnaire and interview. Recording and note taking were used as the instruments. The samples were taken 100 of Indian societies who have been settling in Medan for a long time ago. The samples were also taken based on the age groups, such as; > 60 years old, 36-59 years old, 20-35 years old, 13-19 years old, and < 12 years old. Data were analyzed by using Linier Regression. The result indicated that there were many factors influenced the maintenance of Tamil language among Indian societies in Medan North Sumatera namely; age, education, demography, religion, culture, and attitude. It was proved by the result of data examination which indicated that those factors had influenced significantly with the result of Regression showed p value for the whole variables were 0.000. However, bilingualism and mobility did not indicate significance results in which the p value for bilingualism variable was 0.184 and mobility was 0.720

Big data in Tamil: opportunities, benefits and challenges

This paper gives an overall introduction on big data and has tried to introduce Big Data in Tamil. It discusses the potential opportunities, benefits and likely challenges from a very Tamil and Tamil Nadu perspective. The paper has also made original contribution by proposing the ‘big data’s’ terminology in Tamil. The paper further suggests a few areas to explore using big data Tamil on the lines of the Tamil Nadu Government ‘vision 2023’. Whilst, big data has something to offer everyone, it is argued that Tamil language proficiency and favourable policy decision is key to the success of Big data in Tamil and more specifically in Tamil Nadu