Indian Tamil dialect of Sri Lanka

ET is often misunderstood as Indian Tamil as the people who speak this dialect can trace their ancestry back to South India but much research has not been done regarding this dialect due to the misunderstanding that there is absolutely no difference between ET and Indian Tamil.

[1] However research shows that ET is a dialect that heavily differs from Indian Tamil for multiple reasons.

[1] Language contact between the different dialects of Indian Tamil and Sinhala after Sinhala labourers also started working in tea and rubber plantations had a considerable impact in the development of ET as a separate dialect from Indian Tamil.

ET has been in Sri Lanka for over a century and as mentioned above has come into contact with a different language Sinhala.

‘ɳ’ in ET occurs only in loan words or preceding /c/ and /ɳ/ in Indian Tamil is realized as /n/ in ET.

Distribution of languages and religious groups of Sri Lanka on D.S. division and sector level according to the 1981 Census of Population and Housing, Indian Tamil dialect of Sri Lanka is primarily used in the central highlands of the country