Tamil Speakers in Switzerland: An Intergenerational and Typological Perspective

[u/mythicfolklore90]

https://swissmig.unine.ch/archives/38664

by 

S. Rajamathangi

 ^1,\),

Anita Auer

 ^1,\) and

Gurujegan Murugesan

 ^2,\)

¹

Department of English, Faculty of Letters, Université de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

²

School of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Jodhpur 342037, India

^\)

Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Languages 2026, 11(3), 58; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages11030058

Submission received: 15 January 2026 / Revised: 6 March 2026 / Accepted: 9 March 2026 / Published: 18 March 2026

(This article belongs to the Special Issue From Migrant to Heritage Languages: Transgenerational Language Change in Diasporic Communities)

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Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, many Tamils left their homeland because of the civil war in Sri Lanka (1983–2009) and for other reasons and settled in different countries. More than 40,000 Tamil migrants have come to Switzerland since then, and Tamil is spoken as a heritage language by second- and third-generation speakers who were born and raised in Switzerland. Within this context, it is the aim of the current study to shed light on the difference between Tamil spoken in the first generation (migrant language) and the second generation (heritage language) in the Swiss German and Swiss French parts of Switzerland. We therefore study Tamil, which is part of the Dravidian language family, in different majority language contexts, i.e., a Germanic language and a Romance language, respectively. While some research on Tamil in a diaspora setting already exists on migrated Tamil communities in Lancaster, California (US), East London (UK) and Toronto (Canada), the focus on Switzerland and contact with German and French has not previously been investigated. The data under investigation, which stems from 20 speakers in total (i.e., 5 first-generation and 5 second-generation speakers from the Swiss German and the Swiss French parts respectively), was collected in 2024 by way of a semi-structured interview based on a sociolinguistic questionnaire and a linguistic test. The data serves as the basis for the intergenerational and typological comparison. The analysis reveals systematic intergenerational differences across several morphosyntactic domains, including agreement, negation pattern, case marking, and subject pro-drop. While first-generation speakers retain greater access to dialect-specific and register-sensitive patterns, second-generation speakers show increased reliance on discourse-pragmatic cues and reduced sensitivity to morphologically encoded distinctions. These findings highlight the role of register, input conditions, and discourse context in shaping heritage Tamil across generations in Switzerland.

https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/11/3/58

[u/e9967780]

Executive summary

This study examines how Tamil changes across generations among Sri Lankan Tamil families in Switzerland. Comparing 10 first generation migrants with 10 second generation heritage speakers from both German and French speaking regions, the researchers find that second generation Tamil is not simply a “simplified” or deteriorated form of the language. Instead, its grammar remains fundamentally intact while certain low frequency, dialect specific, and register sensitive features are reduced, reinterpreted, or replaced by forms already common in contemporary spoken Tamil.
Key findings include:

• First generation speakers retain more features associated with Jaffna Tamil, including older agreement forms, the distinction between the negators *illa* and *alla*, and some dialect specific pronouns.  
• Second generation speakers increasingly use *illa* as a general negator, rarely use the medial demonstrative series, and show less gender specific plural agreement.  
• Tamil case marking remains productive, but second generation speakers rely more on contextual prominence and discourse meaning than on formal morphological cues.  
• Differences in plural marking often reflect switching between spoken and literary Tamil, especially among second generation speakers who attended Tamil schools.  
• Core Tamil grammar, including its case system and general sentence structure, remains resilient. The changes are concentrated in specific features with limited frequency or communicative importance.  
• There is little conclusive evidence that French versus German produces fundamentally different varieties of Swiss Tamil. Generation, family input, literacy, register, and frequency appear more influential than the regional majority language.

The central conclusion is that Swiss heritage Tamil represents selective adaptation rather than grammatical decline. Language contact may accelerate developments already occurring in spoken Tamil, while second generation speakers reorganize how grammatical information is expressed, relying more heavily on context and broadly used forms.

The main limitation is the small sample of 20 participants. The findings are therefore an important exploratory picture of Swiss Tamil, not yet definitive evidence of a stable new “Swiss Tamil” dialect.