What is the word for ‘romance’ in Tamil? Kadhal is love and anbu is affection. “A lot of people gave similar suggestions but we could not nail it. This is when we discovered that there is no known or commonly used phrase for ‘romance’ in Tamil,” says C Moulee, laughing.
The co-founder of Queer Chennai Chronicle (QCC) says that it takes several such rounds of discussion to come up with appropriate terms to add to their expansive Tamil and English glossary that addresses members of the LBGTQIA+ community with respect.
For over six years now, his group and a host of volunteers from around the world, have been on a quest, amassing a wealth of words spoken by the Tamil-speaking queer community to add to their list published on their website in 2018. They have taken a dive into the world of letters, finding appropriate terms for words like ‘queer’ which is paal puthumai, in Tamil, while also neatly dividing the terms as those referring to gender, sex, sexuality and umbrella terms used by the community.
