The Origins of Colloquial South African Tamil

Abstract

This paper is a demographic and dialectological study of spoken Tamil in South Africa. It is based on fieldwork conducted in KwaZulu-Natal (in Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Umkomaas) between 1990 and 1992. It provides information about Tamil speakers brought from the Madras Presidency to South Africa in the period 1860–1911. The paper aims to characterise the spoken variety that evolved on the plantations of Natal in terms of its dialectal ancestry. Is it a blend of features from the Tamil speaking areas in India, or are particular regions within Tamil Nadu more influential? The same question can be asked of social origins: are some caste varieties better represented than others in the South African offshoot? The paper proposes that South African Tamil is similar to the Northern dialect of Tamil. In terms of social dialectology the evidence is less clear, but a tentative claim is that the South African offshoot avoids the extremities of caste variants of India.