Language and Dialect
The mother tongue of most Iyengars in Tamil Nadu is Tamil. However, they speak a unique Iyengar dialect often called Vaishnava Paribhaashai. This dialect is almost identical with the Iyer dialect known as Brahmin Tamil, the difference being only in the level of Sanskritization. Scholars have often refused to recognise it as a separate dialect regarding it only as a sub-dialect of Brahmin Tamil.
However, Iyengars in Karnataka speak a dialect that has a significant Kannada substrate, which has descended from medieval Tamil. Iyengars in southern Andhra Pradesh speak both Tamil and Telugu.
For a detailed mapping of words and spoken forms of the Iyengar dialects and standard Tamil, see Iyengar Tamil.
Read more about this topic: Iyengar
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or dialect:
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)