"TAMIL", which its present users like to describe as simultaneously "living AND classical", is the common name which is used for referring to several languages, some of them being (A) spontaneously spoken (dialectal) vernaculars,2 used by various sub‐communities of the population of Tamil Nadu, another one being (B) the (formal) variety used in schools, schoolbooks, conferences, most books, mailing lists, blogs, newspapers, and a third one being (C) the Classical variety, which term covers the ancient form of the language which is found for instance in (C1) two well‐known corpora of religious poetical literature, often referred to as "bhakti literature, one concerned with Shiva (the Paṉṉiru Tirumuṟai) and the other one with Vishnu (the Nālāyirat Tivviya Pirapantam), but also in (C2) another poetical corpus, more ancient than the two devotional corpora, and containing what is called "Sangam literature" (to which must be added well‐known works such as the Cilappatikāram and the Maṇimēkalai, etc.). The Classical variety of Tamil is also represented by (C3) a collection of treatises, among which the most ancient (and famous) seems to be the Tolkāppiyam, which consists of 27 chapters, totalling more than 1600 sūtra‐s (or cūttiram‐s), and it should be added that, unlike the sūtra‐s of Pāṇini, the sūtra‐s of the Tolkāppiyam are in metrical form, just like all the works referred to under C1 and C2, i.e. all the hymns that constitute Bhakti literature and all the poems that constitute Sangam literature.
