WAVES AND WORDS

CE explores the unique dialect that fishers along our coastline speak at sea, why it remains important, and how it intertwines with their fishing practices

- Dharshana Raju

What if there were more than just eight directions? Not just North, South, East, West, and their neat combinations that add up to the number eight. What if, for an entire community along our coast, North wasn't even at the top of the compass?

What if the very idea of direction was shaped not by colonisers' maps, but by lived experiences, language, and land?

For the fishers of Chennai, this isn't a thought experiment. Their wind directions aren't plotted on a grid. They are drawn in winds, tides, and ancestral knowledge.

As they push their boats into the sea, something remarkable happens. On land, it's the colloquial Tamil that one would fully comprehend. But once they cross the sea, the dialect changes. While some words may arrive with unfamiliar twists, some other words may seem familiar—like echoes of our own tongue—but slip past meaning. Spoken in the depths of the blue by those with salt in their blood is one such dialect, that neither you nor I hear. Out in the ocean, their dialect is shaped by the sea that they worship as their amma, and the wind they believe to be their guiding ancestors—paatta.

"Once we board our boats, we are no longer mamas and machans. The experienced are called periya aalu, and the inexperienced are called chinna aalu," S Palayam, a retired fisher, explains. "The first time I ventured into the sea for fishing, I mistakenly used the word mama while addressing my experienced uncle who was teaching me to fish and I was immediately warned against it. I apologised, cupped some seawater in my hands, and offered it back to the ocean as an apology. That is the discipline we follow at sea," he adds.