Tamil alphabet
Tamil alphabet is Tamil script, 49 letters. 12 vowels, 18 consonants and 12 vowel signs; voicing is not written but follows from position. The characters are grouped: uyir — the twelve vowels, vallinam — the six hard ones, mellinam — the six nasals. Every character on this page can be played: the sound is stored as a file and does not depend on the voices installed on your system.
Uyir — the twelve vowels
'Uyir' means 'soul': Tamil grammar counts the vowel the soul of the syllable and the consonant its body. A vowel is written as a separate letter only at the beginning of a word.
Vallinam — the six hard ones
The row for the sake of which the Tamil classification is worth memorizing: exactly these six letters change their sound by position in the word. At the start they are voiceless ('ka', 'pa'), between vowels voiced ('ga', 'ba'). There are no separate letters for the voiced ones in Tamil at all.
Mellinam — the six nasals
One nasal for each hard one: ங with க, ஞ with ச, ண with ட, ந with த, ம with ப, ன with ற. The pair always goes together, and the nasal lets one guess which consonant will come next.
Idaiyinam — the six middles
Semivowels and liquids. Here lives ழ — the sound that exists only in Tamil and after which the language names itself: தமிழ்.
Aytham — the third class
One letter, neither a vowel nor a consonant. In old texts a breathing; in modern ones the combination ஃப renders 'f' in borrowings.
Grantha — letters for foreign sounds
Six signs taken from the grantha script for Sanskrit and English words. The Tamil classification does not count them: thirty-one letters means 12 vowels, 18 consonants and the aytham.
The vowel signs and the pulli
Shown on க (ka): a vowel sign is not written on its own. From கா the 'k' must be subtracted in one's head — and the very vowel the sign means remains. The signs 'e', 'ee' and 'ai' are written to the left of the letter although they sound after it, and 'u' and 'uu' fuse with it into a new sign.
What to know about the “Tamil script” script
There are 49 signs: 12 vowels, 18 consonants, the aytham, 6 grantha letters and 12 vowel signs. A consonant and a vowel sign make up the 216 syllables of the uyirmei — the table does not list them one by one, because they assemble by rule. The script is ancient: the Tamil written tradition reaches back to the third century BC, and the round shapes of today are the trace of the palm leaf, which a straight line of the stylus would have torn along its veins. There are no capital letters. And one habit to unlearn from the start: English swallows unstressed vowels, Tamil does not. Each uyirmei syllable carries its vowel at full value: பணம் is pa-nam, not “puh-num”. Tamil has no schwa, and stress does not shorten anything — it is the syllable count, not the stress, that carries the word.
Test yourself
Five characters at random. No need to answer aloud — just pick; the answer appears at once.
- Which character reads as “a”?
The same sound already sits inside every consonant: க is 'ka'. A separate letter is needed only at the beginning of a word
- Which character reads as “ii”?
Long 'i' as in 'see'
- Which character reads as “e”?
Short 'e', between the 'e' of 'bet' and the 'a' of 'bat'
- Which character reads as “o”?
Short 'o', as in 'more' but shorter
- Which character reads as “ka”?
One letter for all three sounds: கடை is read 'kadei', பகல் — 'pagal'. Voicing is not written in Tamil; it follows from the place in the word
How to learn letters so they stay
You cannot learn a table by staring at it. What works: see a character, try to recall its sound, get it wrong, see the right answer — and come back to that character in a day, not in an hour.
- Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
That is why the alphabet in the app is learned a few characters at a time, not all at once: nobody holds 49 signs in one sitting.
Frequently asked
How many letters in the Tamil alphabet?
49 letters — Tamil script. There are no capital and small forms: the character is written the same way everywhere.
Can I listen to how the Tamil letters sound?
Yes. 49 signs on this page have sound: click a character to hear it. The sound works on any phone, and nothing needs to be installed.
How long does it take to learn the Tamil alphabet?
A few characters a day — one to two weeks, if you come back to what you covered. The whole alphabet crammed in an evening is remembered for an evening: without reviews the next day and three days later, the characters are almost entirely gone.
Where to start: letters or words?
With the letters. A word in an unfamiliar script cannot be read at all, and a word card tells you no more than a picture.