Lexical Variations in Tamil Dialects and Their English Translations: A Critical Study.

Translation is an art. To some extent, it is an operation performed across two languages. A single language has many a variety with regard to its characteristics and the uses by its speakers. The varieties are an idiolect, a dialect, slang, register, jargon, pidgin, creole, etc. Dialect changes every sixty kilometers of a place. The factors causing changes in a language variety are manifold. The main reasons are socio-historical and linguistic. Geographically settlements, migrations, language contacts, and language groups contribute for the formation of dialects. Linguistically, word and word meaning, rule extension, pronunciation, and grammaticalization, etc. form the ground for dialects. The levels of difference in a dialect are lexical, phonological, grammatical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. The present paper proposes to analyze the lexical variations inherent in different Tamil dialects and their English translations. Lexis is a unit of sentence or vocabulary of a language. The variation of words occurs when different dialect speakers use varying words for the same context. For the present analysis the three different famous Tamil dialects namely, the Tamil Brahmin dialect, Coastal Muslim dialect and Tamil Dalit dialect have been chosen. It further analyzes the characteristics of lexical differences and causes and also explains the circumstances that create new words like compounding, blending, clipping, borrowing, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]