For the Love of Tamil celebrates the life and work of E. Annamalai (born 1938), the most prominent Tamil linguist of his generation. Spanning six decades and multiple continents, his scholarship ranges from formal analyses of Tamil syntax and semantics to studies of diglossia, pedagogy, language politics and Tamil poetics and literature. This volume collects contributions from leading scholars in various disciplines related to Tamil studies. Together, they reflect the intellectual breadth and disciplinary range of Annamalai’s work, covering classical and modern Tamil literature, grammatical traditions, linguistic analysis, sociolinguistics, and cultural history. They also highlight the lasting importance of Annamalai’s scholarship and demonstrate how his rigorous yet comprehensive approach to Tamil has influenced the study of language, literature, and society.

The publication is available in open access here.