A Study of “Eye Dialects in Tamil V. GNANASUNDARAM Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, A field of research opem for synchronic dialectolcgy in Tamil and in many other languages is the study of what Gleason calls ‘eye dialects’ i. e., reflection of local dialects in modern literature and in contemporary ‘belle-lettres’. Especially the literary works of playwrights are a valuable source but the novelists and short story writers also use their own reflections of local dialects either as a means of characterization or to produce commic effect at least in stretches of direct speech. Such usages may become the object of serious study." Generally in fictions where a writer attempts to represent the continuous stretch of speech of the conversational type we find that an “illusory phonetics’ works simultaneously with in himself. They try to represent the spoken forms from their stock of memory and represent them in writing in the way they feel that the form is spoken. Let us now consider the situation in Tamil. Because of new literary trends in Tamil, many modern Tamil writers have chosen to write the conversational parts of their work in ways similar to the actual pronunciation of these texts in everyday-speech." But when a Tamil writer thus wants to reflect the speech habits of a particular variety or a Tamil area or a 275
