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India. At least in Tamil and Malayalam. "Bharatam" is also used formally in Malayalam, but it generally sounds a bit over the top and nobody except maybe some RSS types would say that in casual speech

Doesn't 'sectarian' generally imply conflict between groups who belong to the same broader religion? 'Communal' in India usually refers to inter-religious conflict. Hindus are commonly referred to as 'the majority community' and Muslims as 'the minority community' (reversed when you talk about...

Standard Tamil did exist—I believe the literary language was based on what was patronised by the Pandya court in Madurai. If Kerala had stayed in the Tamil sphere, people from Kerala would have continued to use this standard in writing, even if they spoke west coast dialect at home. Now as far...

Now I could go on to describe the specific features this alt-west coast dialect might have (spoiler: kind of like Sri Lankan Tamil), but that's probably a bit too specialised. Indeed. I think it would actually be an interesting possibility to explore though.

What if Malayalam hadn’t been so heavily Sanskritized? The Dravidian languages are one of the world’s primary language families, consisting of around 80 varieties scattered across the Indian subcontinent, but with a concentration in peninsular India. This concentration includes the four major...

Thanks, Alex, that helps. In a purely linguistic sense I don't really have a problem with it, but I find that I can't really comment critically on Markov Chains and such. But there is nothing terribly surprising about the results, apart from (poorly-supported) idea of South I splitting off from...

I thought it might be nice to have a thread to discuss interesting linguistic PODS and flesh out our ideas a bit. A couple of things I've thought about: —My personal interest: less Sanskritised Malayalam. I'll do a detailed post on this, maybe tomorrow. —Enduring legacy of the Mitanni. The...