On Nasals and Nasalization in Modern Tamil

Colloquial varieties of Tamil differ in a number of ways from the formal or literary dialect, among them in certain details of phonological structure. This is true even of those colloquials sometimes referred to as "standard colloquial Tamil". A salient feature of these colloquials is nasalization of word-final vowels corresponding to final nasal consonants in the formal dialect. Published phonological analyses of colloquial Tamil treat nasalization in a variety of ways, reflecting in part certain ambiguities in the relationship between this feature and nasal consonants in the colloquial sound pattern. The present paper asserts that these ambiguities are not resolvable within the confines of traditional "taxonomic" phonology, for they require recognition of morphosyntactic units if the distributional relation between nasalized vowels and sequences of vowel and nasal consonant is to be adequately explicated.