Malayalam phonology

For the consonants and vowels, the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbol is given, followed by the Malayalam character and the ISO 15919 transliteration.

Vowels

 * * is the, an epenthentic vowel in Malayalam. Therefore, it has no independent vowel letter (because it never occurs at the beginning of words) but, when it comes after a consonant, there are various ways of representing it. In medieval times, it was just represented with the symbol for , but later on it was just completely omitted (that is, written as an inherent vowel). In modern times, it is written in two different ways – the Northern style, in which a chandrakkala is used, and the Southern or Travancore style, in which the diacritic for a  is attached to the preceding consonant and a chandrakkala is written above.
 * * (phonetically central: ) and  are both represented as basic or "default" vowels in the Abugida script (although  never occurs word-initially and therefore does not make use of the letter അ), but they are distinct vowels.

Malayalam has also borrowed the Sanskrit diphthongs of (represented in Malayalam as ഔ, au) and  (represented in Malayalam as ഐ, ai), although these mostly occur only in Sanskrit loanwords. Traditionally (as in Sanskrit), four vocalic consonants (usually pronounced in Malayalam as consonants followed by the, which is not officially a vowel, and not as actual vocalic consonants) have been classified as vowels: vocalic r (ഋ, , ), long vocalic r (ൠ, , ), vocalic l (ഌ, , ) and long vocalic l (ൡ, , ). Except for the first, the other three have been omitted from the current script used in Kerala as there are no words in current Malayalam that use them.

Consonants

 * The unaspirated alveolar plosive stop once had a separate character but it has become obsolete, as the sound only occurs in geminate form (when geminated it is written with a റ below another റ) or immediately following other consonants (in these cases, റ or ററ are usually written in small size underneath the first consonant). The archaic letter can be found in the $⟨⟩$ row here.
 * The alveolar nasal also had a separate character that is now obsolete (it can be seen in the $⟨⟩$ row here ) and the sound is now almost always represented by the symbol that was originally used only for the dental nasal. However, both sounds are extensively used in current colloquial and official Malayalam, and although they were allophones in Old Malayalam, they now occasionally contrast in gemination – for example, ' ("by me", first person singular pronoun in the instrumental case) and ' ("if that is so", elided from the original '), which are both written '.
 * The letter ഫ represents both, a phoneme occurring in Sanskrit loanwords, and , which is mostly found in comparatively recent borrowings from European languages.
 * The voiceless unaspirated plosives, the nasals and the laterals can be geminated.

Number system and other symbols
Malayalam numbers and fractions are written as follows. These are archaic and no longer commonly used. Note that there is a confusion about the glyph of Malayalam digit zero. The correct form is oval-shaped, but occasionally the glyph for ¼ (൳) is erroneously shown as the glyph for 0.