Tamil Mauritian

Tamil Mauritians are the descendants of Tamil migrants to Mauritius. The original immigrants from Tamil were craftsmen and tradesmen, and arrived when Mauritians was ruled by France. The island nation has a Tamil population of 115,000. Most were brought by the British from Tamil Nadu after 1727 to serve as labourers on the sugar cane plantations. Around 15 percent of Indo-Mauritians are Tamils. The community includes a Hindu majority, and the rest are Christians (largely Roman Catholic). They account to 55,000 of the Mauritian population. Of this number, around 7000 people reported that they spoke Tamil. Most tamils in Mauritius are Hindus. A large population of the Tamils in Mauritius lives at Rose-Hill.

Thaipusam, the Tamil Hindu festival, is a national holiday in Mauritius and is notable in the temples.

Most can read, write it to some extent, but very few can speak it well. Even though most speak Mauritian Creole, it includes many Tamil words. A Tamil magazine Pathirikai and Tamil radio Onex FM exist in Mauritius. Most cultural aspects and rituals can be seen in full-fledged manner. Around a 100 schools teach Tamil as a mother tongue subject. It can also be learned at the university level. A Tamil conference was held here. Murugan temples are common and some Tamil place names are found here.

Tamil

Tamil may refer to:

See also

Tamil language

Tamil /ˈtæmɪl/ (தமிழ், tamiḻ, [t̪ɐmɨɻ] ^?) is a Dravidian language predominantly spoken by the Tamil people of India and northern Sri Lanka, and also by the Tamil diaspora. Tamil is an official language of two countries, Singapore and Sri Lanka, and has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the Indian Union Territory of Puducherry. It is also used as one of the languages of education in Malaysia, along with English, Malay and Mandarin. In India, outside of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, Tamil is also spoken in the states of Kerala, Puducherry and Andaman and Nicobar Islands as a secondary language and by minorities in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and was the first Indian language declared as a classical language, which was done by the Government of India in 2004. The language is also spoken by Tamil minorities in Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, United Kingdom, Mauritius, Canada,South Africa,Fiji,Germany, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Indonesia and France, as well as smaller emigrant communities elsewhere.

Tamil (Unicode block)

Tamil is a Unicode block containing characters for the Tamil, Badaga, and Saurashtra languages of Tamil Nadu India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. In its original incarnation, the code points U+0B02..U+0BCD were a direct copy of the Tamil characters A2-ED from the 1988 ISCII standard. The Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam blocks were similarly all based on their ISCII encodings.

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