Phonetics of Spoken Tamil

There are a number of descriptions of the phonetics of Spoken Tamil available in various sources (Asher 1987, Rajaram 1972, Firth 1934 (in Arden 1942)); it is useful to point out where many of them lean in the direction of Literary Tamil (LT) pronunciation, even when they profess to be describing ST. Thus, though we would like to concentrate on describing ST, we must often do it by contrasting it with LT, in order to emphasize the differences, which do not often get adequately described.

• Tamil Vowels
  • Initial Position
  • Final Position
  • Words ending in a vowel plus nasal.
  • The epenthetic vowel Ë u
  • Words ending in Sonorants, Liquids and Glides
  • Rhotics, final and otherwise.
• Nasal Consonants.
• Glides.
• Stop consonants
  • Deletion of intervocalic ¬ v and ¡ k
  • Voiced Consonants.
• Gemination
• Vowel length
  • Transliteration of LT and ST.