E. Annamalai

E. Annamalai
Ph.D in Linguistics, 1969
University of Chicago

As a Visiting Professor of Tamil at YCIAS since September 2004, I teach Tamil language courses. I also teach courses on political and public-cultural dimensions of language in India (in Anthropology) and on the structure of the Tamil language (in Linguistics).

As the Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore I was involved in developing language policy and in implementing programs for the development of Indian languages, primarily their use in education. I am currently a member of the National Council for the Development of Indian Languages, New Delhi.

I have been a visiting fellow doing research on Tamil language at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo; International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen and Leipzig and The University of Melbourne. The research has been on grammatical and socio-political aspects of the language.

My interest in language diversity and in the consequences of language contact has extended to documentation and revitalization of endangered languages. I was a member of the panel of the Endangered Languages Documentation Project, SOAS, London, UNESCO�s World Language Survey, Bilbao, Spain and is the Vice President of Terralingua, Washington D.C, which supports projects to study the links between biological and cultural diversity.

My recent sociolinguistic publications include the papers Language Choice in Education: Conflict Resolution in Indian Courts (in Language Science 2:1, 1999); Use of Language Rights by Minorities (in Right to Language, Equity, Power and Education edited by Robert Phillipson, 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum); Medium of Power: The Question of English in Educationin India (in Medium of Instruction Policies: Which agenda? Whose Agenda? edited by James Tollefson and Amy Tsui, 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum); Language Policy for Multilingualism: A Reflective Essay (in Language Policy 2:2, 2003), Nation-Building in a Gloablized World: Language Choice and Education in India (in Decolonization, Globalization: Language-in-Education Policy and Practice edited by Angel M.Y.Lin and Peter W.Martin, 2005, Multilingual Matters) and the book Managing Multilingualism: Politicaland Linguistic Manifestations (2001, Sage).

My recent publications on Tamil language include the papers The Constituent Structure of Tamil and Case and the Argument Structure of Tamil (in The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 2003 and 2004, Mouton), NP Gaps in Tamil: Syntactic versus Pragmatic (in Polymorphous Linguistics: Jim McCawley�s Legacy edited by Salikoko S. Mufwene et al, 2005, MIT) and the books Adjectival Clauses in Tamil (1997), Lectures on Modern Tamil (1999) and (with Ron Asher) Colloquial Tamil (2002). Under my guidance were produced A Dictionary of Contemporary Tamil (1992), Dictionary of Idioms and Phrases of Contemporary Tamil (1997) and Tamil Style Manual (2001).

Office address:
The MacMillan Center, Luce Hall
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511

Postal address:
South Asian Studies Council
The MacMillan Center
P.O. Box 208206
New Haven, CT 06520-8206