The

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

inventory of the

Marathi language Marathi (; ''Marāṭhī'', ) is an Indo-Aryan language predominantly spoken by Marathi people in the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the official language of Maharashtra, and additional official language in the state of Goa. It is one of t ...

is similar to that of many other

Indo-Aryan languages The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily ...

. An IPA chart of all contrastive sounds in Marathi is provided below.

Vowels

Vowels in native words are: There is no phonemic length distinction, even though it is indicated in the script. Some educated speakers try to maintain a length distinction in learned borrowings (''

tatsama Tatsama ( sa, तत्सम , lit. 'same as that') are Sanskrit loanwords in modern Indo-Aryan languages like Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Hindi, Gujarati, and Sinhala and in Dravidian languages like Malayalam and Telugu. They ...

s'') from Sanskrit. There are no nasal vowels. Like other alphasyllabaries, Devanagari writes out syllables by adding vowel

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

s to consonant bases. The table below includes all the vowel symbols used in Marathi, along with a transliteration of each sound into

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern I ...

and IPA. Marathi furthermore contrasts with . There are two more vowels in Marathi to denote the pronunciations of English words such as of in ''act'' and in ''all''. These are written as and . Marathi retains several features of Sanskrit that have been lost in north-Indian Sanskrit-based languages such as Hindi and Bengali, especially in terms of pronunciation of vowels and consonants. For instance, Marathi retains the original Sanskrit pronunciation of , , and . However, as in Gujarati, Marathi speakers tend to pronounce ऋ somewhat similar to , unlike most other Indic languages which changed it to (e.g. the original Sanskrit pronunciation of the language's name was ', while in day-to-day Marathi and Gujarati it is '. In other Indic languages, it is closer to '). Spoken Marathi allows for conservative stress patterns in words like राम (''rama'') with an emphasis on the ending vowel sound, a feature that has been lost in Hindi.

Consonants

* Marathi used to have a /t͡sʰ/ but it merged with /s/. * Some speakers pronounce /d͡z, d͡zʱ/ as fricatives but the aspiration is maintained in /zʱ/. A defining feature of the Marathi language is the split of the consonant ल /la/ in Sanskrit words into a

retroflex lateral flap The voiced retroflex lateral flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The expected symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ().Kirk Miller & Michael AshbyL2/20-252RUnicode request for IPA modifier-letters (a), ...

ळ () and alveolar ल (). For instance, कुळ (') for the Sanskrit कुलम् (''kulam'' 'clan') and कमळ (') for Sanskrit कमलम् (''kamalam'' 'lotus'). Marathi got ळ possibly due to long contact from Dravidian languages; there are some ḷ words loaned from Kannada like ṭhaḷak from kn. taḷaku but most of the words are native.

Vedic Sanskrit Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...

did have /ɭ, ɭʱ/ as well, but they merged with /ɖ, ɖʱ/ by the time of classical Sanskrit. The table below includes all the consonant bases onto which vowel diacritics are placed. The lack of a vowel diacritic can either indicate the lack of a vowel, or the existence of the default, or "inherent", vowel, which in the case of Marathi is the schwa.

Example of consonant–vowel combination

The combination of the vowels with the k-series

Consonant clusters

In Marathi, the consonants by default come with a schwa. Therefore, तयाचे will be 'tayāċe', not 'tyāċe'. To form 'tyāċe', one should add त् to याचे, which would yield त्याचे.

References

External links

Marathi language sounds
{{DEFAULTSORT:Marathi Phonology * Indo-Aryan phonologies