Tirukkural Multilingual

Central Institute of Classical Tamil (CICT)

About this app

The Tirukkuṟaḷ, complete, in the 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule — from the Central Institute of Classical Tamil.

All 1,330 couplets in Tamil, each with the Institute's published translations, the classical commentary, a word-by-word grammatical reading, a full metrical analysis, and the palm-leaf manuscript that carries it. The entire book is inside the app: no account, no advertising, and no network needed to read a single line.

TWENTY-TWO LANGUAGES, THIRTY TRANSLATIONS

Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu — with Kashmiri also in Nastaliq, Konkani in both Kannada and Devanagari scripts, and Manipuri in both Bengali and Meetei Mayek. Three English translations are included, along with Bhojpuri.

Every translation is a published CICT edition, credited to its translator on the page where you read it.

READ TWO LANGUAGES AT ONCE

Put Tamil beside any one of the thirty streams and read a whole chapter in parallel — so a Hindi reader and a Tamil reader can follow the same couplet together. Or open a single kural and see it in all twenty-nine translations at once.

WHAT IS UNDER EACH COUPLET

• Word-by-word grammar. Tap any word for its இலக்கணக் குறிப்பு — part of speech, case, compound, and a plain-language gloss, with a glossary for every term.
• Metre. Every couplet carries a full யாப்பு analysis: அசை, சீர், தளை, வாய்பாடு and the ஈற்றுச்சீர், produced by the Institute's metrical scanner.
• Prose. மு. வரதராசனார்'s Tamil paraphrase, the Institute's Tamil critical commentary by Prof. P. Marudanayagam, and an English prose reading.
• Transliteration in Latin script.

THE MANUSCRIPT ITSELF

For the first hundred chapters, each couplet is linked to the palm-leaf line that carries it in the Institute's digitised collection — the scribe's own reading travels with the app, and the photograph of the leaf can be called up when you are online.

SEARCH ACROSS EVERY LANGUAGE

Type in any script and the app searches the languages written in it. A reader who knows only the Bengali or Hindi rendering can still find the Tamil original.

STUDY AND PRACTICE

• Spaced repetition for readers memorising the text.
• Metre practice — hear the couplet as beats, or tap along and be scored against its true mātrā pattern.
• A kural each day, at a time you choose, with a card you can share.

READS ALOUD

Couplets and commentary are spoken using the text-to-speech voices installed on your device. Install a Tamil voice in your Android settings for the best result.

COMPLETELY OFFLINE, AND PRIVATE

The whole book travels inside the app. There is no sign-in, no advertising, no analytics and no tracking of any kind. Nothing you read, bookmark or study leaves your phone. The only time the app uses the internet is when you ask to see a manuscript photograph.

Free, and released under CC BY 4.0 by the Central Institute of Classical Tamil, Chennai — செம்மொழித் தமிழாய்வு மத்திய நிறுவனம்.

What’s new

Tirukkural Multilingual