Tamil in numbers
Tamil has about 79 million first-language speakers and 86 million in total. It's spoken in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, is official in Sri Lanka and Singapore, and was India's first language declared 'classical', in 2004.
Two registers
Tamil runs from formal Centamil (textbooks, formal speech) to colloquial Koduntamil (films, everyday talk). 'It is here' is written irukkiradhu but spoken irukku. That gap is why translated Tamil can sound bookish — conversational source English helps.







