History
See also: Manipravalam and Grantha alphabetBrahmin Tamil is believed to have evolved over a long period of time starting from the days of the legendary sage Agastya. However, the dialect took its present form during the reign of the Vijayanagar Empire. During the heyday of Brahmin domination in the early 1900s, Brahmin Tamil was used as the lingua-franca for inter-caste communication. The principal characters in the Tamil movies of the period (1930s and 1940s) also spoke the Brahmin dialect. However, with the rise of the Pure Tamil Movement and the entry of Dravidian ideologues into Tamil cinema in the 1950s, Brahmin Tamil was gradually displaced from public spheres. Today, Brahmin Tamil is only used in films and television soaps centred on the Brahmin society. Brahmin Tamil, has however, continued to flourish among the expatriate community.
The first systematic study of Brahmin Tamil was undertaken by Jules Bloch in 1910. However, the most detailed study was conducted by A. K. Ramanujan and William Bright in the 1960s. More recent researches on Brahmin Tamil and other socio-dialects have been conducted by Kamil Zvelebil.
Read more about this topic: Brahmin Tamil
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)