Colloquial Tamil is easy to use and completely up to date! Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, the course offers a step-by-step approach to spoken Tamil. While emphasis is placed on colloquial spoken Tamil, you are given a useful introduction to formal speech and the written language as well. What makes Colloquial Tamil your best choice in personal language learning? Emphasis on authentic conversational language Clear explanations on how to pronounce and write the language Helpful grammar notes and reference grammar Comprehensive vocabulary lists (Tamil-English and English-Tamil) Lively illustrations and fascinating cultural insights throughout By the end of this rewarding course, you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in Tamil in a broad range of everyday situations. Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

Throughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization. What originally began as a format of religious speech became an essential political infrastructure used to galvanize support for new social imaginaries, from Indian independence to Tamil nationalism. Completed by a team of Bate's colleagues, this ethnography marries linguistic anthropology to performance studies and political history, illuminating new geographies of belonging in the modern era.