Linguistic Framing of Disability in Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam Literature

Mouli Chaudhuri

Visiting Faculty

Department of Basic Science and Humanities

Dr. Sudhir Chandra

Sur Institute of Technology and Sports Complex (SurTech)

540 Dum Dum Road, Surermath, (Near Dum Dum Jn. Station)

Kolkata-700074 West Bengal (affiliated by MAKAUT)

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1486-1690

Abstract— Disability in literature is constructed not only through characters and plots but also through the linguistic choices that determine whose body, voice, agency, and social position are treated as normative.
This study proposes a comparative computational-literary investigation of disability framing in Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam literary texts, three linguistically related yet culturally distinctive South Indian traditions. The central research gap lies in the absence of systematic multilingual analysis examining how disability is encoded through evaluative vocabulary, metaphor, agency attribution, emotional positioning, and social-role descriptions across these literatures.
The study conceptualizes disability framing through five dimensions: deficit-oriented representation, dependency, social exclusion, exceptionalism, and agency-centred representation. It proposes combining close reading with multilingual natural-language processing so that culturally specific expressions are not reduced to literal lexical equivalence. Contextual language representations, semantic clustering, sentiment-in-context, metaphor annotation, and syntactic agency analysis are used to distinguish descriptions of bodily difference from broader ableist narrative structures.
Keywords— disability representation, linguistic framing, Tamil literature, Kannada literature, Malayalam literature, computational humanities

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