Speech carries not only the semantic content but also the paralinguistic information which captures the speaking style. Speaker traits and emotional states affect how words are being spoken. The research on paralinguistic information is an emerging field in speech and language processing and it has many potential applications including speech recognition, speaker identification and verification, emotion recognition and accent recognition. Among them, there is a significant interest in emotion recognition from speech. A detailed study of paralinguistic information present in speech signal and an overview of research work related to speech emotion for Tamil Language is presented in this paper.