Colloquial Tamil is easy to use and completely up to date! Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, the course offers a step-by-step approach to spoken Tamil. While emphasis is placed on colloquial spoken Tamil, you are given a useful introduction to formal speech and the written language as well. What makes Colloquial Tamil your best choice in personal language learning? Emphasis on authentic conversational language Clear explanations on how to pronounce and write the language Helpful grammar notes and reference grammar Comprehensive vocabulary lists (Tamil-English and English-Tamil) Lively illustrations and fascinating cultural insights throughout By the end of this rewarding course, you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in Tamil in a broad range of everyday situations. Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

Spoken Tamil for Absolute Beginners is the most comprehensive English guide for Tamil Language on the market for Absolute beginners: This book is a structured and systematic approach to teach yourself spoken Tamil. Written by a well-experienced teacher specialized in teaching Tamil to foreigners. What is unique about this book? What makes it better than other Tamil language learning books? This book is the best in the market because it contains: - Fun and essential vocabulary and phrases. - Speaking, listening and reading practice. - Pronunciation, Cultural notes and Grammar explanation in very detailed manner. - 30 plus audio tracks can be downloaded from google drive to listen to. Details are given inside - Provided vocabulary, verbs and verb conjugation in memrise application to make the learning experience more fun and intuitive. - Support from the author will be provided at all times, and you can even take lessons from the author. - Built using simple, easy to understand English with an elaborate explanation. At the end of the book, you will be able to speak in Tamil, by making sentences using 3 - 6 words. This is the main and only goal of this book. Whether you are a foreigner visiting places where Tamil is the main spoken language or you want to interact with a Tamil native speaker in your place or you want to learn a language which is centuries old with lots of cultural values. This book is for you.

This book is intended to teach Tamil, a classical Indian language, to native speakers of English and others who know English. Highly motivated students may use this book for a self study. The book takes a systematic approach to teaching the language to adults.

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.

A study of the lives of popular theater artists, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage is the first in-depth analysis of Special Drama, a genre of performance unique to the southernmost Indian state of Tamilnadu. Held in towns and villages throughout the region, Special Drama performances last from 10 p.m. until dawn. There are no theatrical troupes in Special Drama; individual artists are contracted “specially” for each event. The first two hours of each performance are filled with the kind of bawdy, improvisational comedy that is the primary focus of this study; the remaining hours present more markedly staid dramatic treatments of myth and history. Special Drama artists themselves are of all ages, castes, and ethnic and religious affiliations; the one common denominator in their lives is their lower-class status. Artists regularly speak of how poverty compelled their entrance into the field. Special Drama is looked down upon by the middle- and upper-classes as too popular, too vulgar, and too “mixed.” The artists are stigmatized: people insult them in public and landlords refuse to rent to them. Stigma falls most heavily, however, on actresses, who are marked as “public women” by their participation in Special Drama. As Susan Seizer’s sensitive study shows, one of the primary ways the performers deal with such stigma is through humor and linguistic play. Their comedic performances in particular directly address questions of class, culture, and gender deviations—the very issues that so stigmatize them. Seizer draws on extensive interviews with performers, sponsors, audience members, and drama agents as well as on careful readings of live Special Drama performances in considering the complexities of performers’ lives both on stage and off.