A piece by Vijay Nambisan in the India Foundation for the Arts' magazine made some interesting points about written and spoken languages in South India:
"... Malayalam is a highly diglossal language, much more so than any of its northern sisters. The farther south you go in India, I think, the further apart grow the written and spoken languages.... I can barely comprehend the newspapers, and most literary texts are closed books to me." (32)
I feel his pain -- as a near fluent speaker of one variety of Tamil (spoken in one place among one caste), it is a source of constant frustration to me that I have to concentrate to understand the news on Tamil Doordarshan or political speeches.
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Yes, I often wondered about the difficulty of comprehending the TV news during my time in Tamil Nadu--if one is a native Tamil speaker but is not literate, is the spoken news somewhat incomprehensible, given that the formality of the journalistic language involves many of the "written" vocabulary forms? And does this prohibit poorer or less-educated Tamilians from gaining an understanding of current events? I never really got a straight answer on this . . .
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