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Revision as of 01:54, 7 April 2004 by 68.119.82.49 (talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)The Tamil people are a South Asian community numbering more than seventy million and living mostly in Tamil Nadu state and neighbouring areas in south-eastern India (65 million), in the north and east of Sri Lanka (three million), in Malaysia (two million) and in Singapore (approx two hundred thousand). There are also pockets of Tamil communities living in Madagascar, Seychelles Islands, Australia (expatriate SriLankan Tamils), South Africa, Mauritius, Trinidad.
Nearly all Tamils speak the Tamil language, one of the Dravidian tongues once spoken widely across the Indian subcontinent but now largely confined to its southern quarter. Generally speaking, Tamils have a stronger ethno-linguistic identity than other Indian language-groups, distinguishing themselves from other Indian groups speaking Sanskrit-derived languages.
Most Tamils are Hindu, with significant minorities being Christian or Muslim.
In Sri Lanka, armed conflict between the Sinhala dominated government and the militant Tamil Tiger separatists during the 1980s and 1990s has now given way to a gradual peace process. Sri Lanka's Tamils are mostly descendants of the island's earlier Dravidian inhabitants, with a significant minority being immigrant labor the British brought from Tamil Nadu when they ruled the Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka).
There are now large Tamil communities in many parts of the world, including Europe and North America (especially Toronto), and Tamils can no longer be considered a purely Asia-centred ethnic group.
Trivia
Tamil is actually the anglicized pronounciation of the more exact Tamizh; the popular usage among Indians to refer to the Tamil people is Tamilians. (Singular: Tamilian).