Harold F. Schiffman

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.

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 essential understandings of Fishmanian sociolinguistics in two short essays that integrate his life's work. The first essay by García and Schiffman identifies the major theoretical contributions and the development of Fishmanian sociolinguistics, often echoing Fishman's own words. The essay by Peltz then analyzes Fishman´s contributions to Yiddish scholarship, as well as the role of that scholarship in his general work. These essential understandings are then extended through Fishman's own concluding sentiments, as well as by the comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography of over 1,000 titles of Joshua A. Fishman's work, compiled by his wife, Gella Schweid Fishman. Together, the contributions in this volume pay tribute to the life work of one of the world's most prolific and original scholars in the field of sociolinguistics -- the founder of what we refer to in this volume as Fishmanian sociolinguistics.

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 benefitted from extensive native-speaker input and the author’s own long experience of teaching Tamil to English-speakers.