Consonants
The consonants are known as mey ezhuttu (mey-body, ezhuttu-letters).The consonants are classified into three categories with six in each category: vallinam - hard, mellinam - soft or Nasal, and idayinam - medium. Tamil has very restricted consonant clusters (e.g. never word initial) and has neither aspirated nor voiced stops. Some scholars have suggested that in Chenthamil (which refers to Tamil as it existed before Sanskrit words were borrowed), stops were voiceless when at the start of a word and voiced allophonically otherwise.
A chart of the Tamil consonant phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet follows:
| Labial | Dental Alveolar |
Retroflex | Postalveolar Palatal |
Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɳ | (ɲ) | ||
| Stop | p (b) | t̪ (d̪) | ʈ (ɖ) | k (ɡ) | ||
| Affricate | tʃ (dʒ) | |||||
| Fricative | (f) | (z) | ||||
| Tap | ||||||
| Approximant | ʋ | j | ||||
| Lateral approximant | l |
- /f/ and /z/ are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, being found only in loanwords and frequently replaced by native sounds.
The voiceless consonants have multiple allophones, depending on position.
| Place | Initial | Geminate | Intervocalic | Post-nasal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Velar | k | kk | h~∅ | ɡ |
| Palatal | tʃ~s | ttʃ | s | dʒ |
| Retroflex | — | ʈʈ | ɖ | ɖ |
| Alveolar | — | t̪t̪ | r | r |
| Dental | t̪ | ð | d̪ | |
| Labial | p | pp | β~w | b |
Read more about this topic: Tamil Phonology