- ISO 639
ta- Its own name
- தமிழ்
- Script
- Other-Brahmic
- Direction
- Left to right
Tamil
Tamil (தமிழ்) is spoken by 90.6M people across 8 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 2 of them. India holds 92% of its speakers.
Reach summary
What one translation into Tamil covers, across every market that speaks it.
Speakers
90.6M
India 92% · Sri Lanka 4% · United Kingdom 2%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 8 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory.
Online speakers
63.9M
0%100%
71% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
92%
0%100%
One market with a diaspora: India holds 92% of speakers. Take the tone and conventions from there.
Territories
8
2 where it is official nationally, 0 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$21.3T
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears. It counts whole economies, not the speakers' share, so read it as an upper bound.
Translation rate
1.00×
1.0×1.6×+
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate used across this site's estimators.
Where Tamil is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column has no total.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IndiaIN | 5.9% | 83.1M | 58.2M | minority or diaspora |
| Sri LankaLK | 15% | 3.3M | 1.8M | official |
| United KingdomGB | 3.2% | 2.2M | 2.1M | minority or diaspora |
| MalaysiaMY | 4.2% | 1.5M | 1.4M | minority or diaspora |
| CanadaCA | 0.7% | 252.2K | 237.9K | minority or diaspora |
| SingaporeSG | 2.1% | 126.6K | 119.5K | official |
| RéunionRE | 15% | 118.1K | — | minority or diaspora |
| MauritiusMU | 2.5% | 32.8K | 24K | minority or diaspora |
CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own, but they are why total reach runs higher than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means no World Bank internet figure, not zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation.
Writing system
Other-Brahmic
Lays out left to right, the same as the source. Bundle a webfont: platform defaults do not reliably cover this script.
Plural categories
2
Every counted message needs up to 2 arms, and the translator needs all of them.
Rate index
1.00×
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate.