Eelam

Eelam (Tamil: ஈழம், īḻam, Tamil: [iːɻɐm], also spelled Eezham, Ilam or Izham in English) is the native Tamil name for the South Asian island now known as Sri Lanka. Eelam is also the Tamil name for the spurge (a plant), toddy (an intoxicant) and gold.

This article is about the Tamil name for Sri Lanka. For the ideological state, see Tamil Eelam.
"Īḻam" redirects here. For other uses, see Ilam (disambiguation).
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Sri Lankan Tamils
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The exact etymology and the original meaning of the word are not clearly known, and there are number of conflicting theories. The Retroflex approximant ḻ in īḻam is a characteristic phoneme for Dravidian languages, now only retained in the closely related languages Tamil and Malayalam. Conventionally it has been represented in the Latin script with the digraph zh.

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