This volume presents the plenary session papers and formal comments along with the papers presented in the general session of the Seminar on Dialectology, held on December 12th to 14th, 1983, at Tamil University, Thanjavur. All the papers were received in advance for presentation in the conference and they were circulated to all the participants. Plenary session papers were sent to some of the invities earlier in order to prepare a formal discussion to be presented during the session itself.
The plenary session took conveniently one paper each morning which was presented by respective authors and was discussed first by the commentator and then by the participants in open discussion. It was decided for various reasons that only the Plenary Session papers and the formal discussions prepared for the conference alone will be considered for publication in this volume. Some of the selected papers presented in the general session are also included in this volume. The inaugural address given by Professor V.I.Subramoniam, Vice-Chancellor and the presidential address of Professor K.Vellaivarananar, Dean of Language Faculty, Tamil University, Thanjavur are also included in this volume.
Hope this volume will enlighten the Tamil dialectologists in their theoretical framework and provide earnest guidelines for their research in the field of Tamil dialectology in future.
Seminar on Dialectology was held by the Department of Linguistics, Tamil University in order to initiate only its ambitious project Dialect Survey of Tamil Nadu. Nearly fifty eminent scholars in the field of Dialectology came from all over the country to participate in the above seminar held on December 12th to 14th, 1983. The Seminar on Dialectology was intended to convene all the scholars working in dialectology and especially in Tamil dialectology and to share our ideas with them regarding our project Dialect Survey of Tamil Nadu.
Nearly 20 papers were presented at the seminar. Of these, three papers invited for plenary session were received in advance and sent for the comments of selected scholars. It was conveniently arranged in all the three days of the seminar to have the plenary session in the mornings and a general session in the afternoons. The papers in the plenary session were directly related to Tamil dialectology while the papers in the general session were related to the practical experience of the dialectologist in the field. Out of nearly 15 papers presented in the general session only five which were revised and submitted for publication were included in this volume.
Everyone in the field of Tamil dialectology felt the immediate need to take account of Tamil dialect studies done so far and their significant contributions. The dialect studies done so far are mostly on the phono-logical, lexical and morphological levels in decreasing order. The vowel phonemes in all these Tamil dialect studies are found to be almost the same with similar allophones corresponding to them. But, the consonant phonemes of Tamil are the ones which vary very often from dialect to dialect, such as the absence or presence of voiced stops; convergence or maintenance of the alveolar and retroflex laterals, sibilants, pharyngeal fricatives, etc. Frequent use of a particular grammatical form or a lexical item may constitute to the bundles of isogloss to fix a dialect area. There does not seem to be any concurrence among Tamil dialectologists regarding the number of areal and social dialects, the existence of standard regional dialects and the emergence of the standard spoken dialect of Tamil. However the above dialect studies do not seem to establish the basic requirements of fixing the significant isogloss bundles for regionalwise and socialwise dialect areas.
Shanmugam Pillai's critical review of Tamil dialectology in this volume points out the vacuum in the study of Tamil dialectology suffering from inadequate data, subjective analysis and speculative conclusions. Shanmugam Pillai strongly recommends for a thorough dialect study of the whole area of Tamil Nadu with serious commitment to the discipline.
It is true that though studies on the dynamic nature of dialects are necessary for theoretical inquisitiveness, the traditional dialect survey based using elaborate questionnaires which covers a range of phonological, morphological and lexical differences is the immediate need of our time for Tamil language. The plea by Gnana-sundaram in his paper on "The Research Methodology and Theoretical Problems in Dialectology" is towards this approach.
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