E. Annamalai graduated in Tamil literature at Annamalai University, India and in Linguistics at the University of Chicago. His academic work spans six decades and ranges over social and political aspects of language, grammatical descriptions of Tamil as espoused in the indigenous grammatical thoughts and in modern linguistic theories. He has occupied invited research positions in India, Japan, Australia, Europe, Israel and a teaching position at Yale in the U.S. His research outputs are inclusive of the theoretical and applied aspects of language.