E.Annamalai studied Tamil and Linguistics at Annamalai University and received Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He taught in both these places before he joined the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. He designed and guided projects to describe, develop and teach the tribal languages of India. He eventually became its Director and was responsible for developing national policy and programs for the development of all Indian languages, training teachers to teach, and producing materials to learn, Indian languages as a second language in schools.

 

He was a visiting professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo; International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen; Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig; University of Melbourne and Yale University, New Haven. Currently, he is Visiting Professor of Tamil at the University of Chicago. He was a member of the panel of the Endangered Languages Documentation Project, London, UNESCO’s committee on World Language Survey, Bilbao, Spain and Chair of the Board of Governors, Terralingua, a non-profit organization for bio-cultural diversity, Canada and Secretary-General of International Association for Tamil Research. Under his leadership were produced A Dictionary of Contemporary Tamil, Dictionary of Idioms and Phrases of Contemporary Tamil and Tamil Style Manual.  He has published numerous papers on language in education, language in contact, language structure and multilingualism. Some of his important books are Language Movements in India, Dynamics of Verbal Extension in Tamil, Adjectival Clauses in Tamil, Lectures on Modern Tamil, Managing Multilingualism in India: Political and Linguistic Manifestations, Social Dimensions of Modern Tamil and (with R.E. Asher) Colloquial Tamil.