CTF 2019: Never Alone: The Linguistic Ecologies of Tamil

One foundational insight from sociolinguistics and anthropology (though it is not theirs alone, of course) are that languages and cultures are never alone but are the product—even in (and especially in) their seeming self-same identity—of process of blurring and separation, negotiation and contestation. Variously theorized in different traditions as contact, hybridization, syncretization, mixing, or heteroglossia, such questions of identity and difference haunt the history of Tamilagam and its study. A constant issue in the south of the subcontinent, from the earliest historical times to the present, are the ways in which that Tamil is in intimate and contentious contact with various Others—Sanskrit and Prakrit in the past, Hindi and English in the present (to say nothing of other contact zones with neighboring Indic languages and other European languages)—be it at the level of linguistic structure, discourse genres, literature, visual arts, among other culture domains. As in other places, such complex entanglements are the very stuff of political life—the most recent, and well-studied perhaps, being the region’s post-colonial history of linguistic nationalism, the Dravidian movement—though earlier periods, and other places beyond India (e.g., Sri Lanka, Malaysia) and South Asia (e.g., in diasporic Canada), have evinced comparable moments of identity formation and differentiation. This workshop brings together scholars from a number of disciplines (linguistics, anthropology, history, literature) to think about these entangled linguistic and cultural ecologies of Tamil and its Others, the structuration of the conjuctures between and within such ecologies and their sedimentation into different regimes of language and identity, and the limits therein.