Belonging to the group of Southern Indic scripts, Tamil script is derived from Grantha script, a descendant of the ancient Brahmi script. Closely related to Malayalam, Tamil script is used in writing the Tamil language in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in Sri Lanka. It is also used by large emigrant communities in Singapore and Malaysia. Tamil belongs to the Dravidian group of languages which includes Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. Similar to other Brahmi-derived Indic scripts, Tamil demonstrates the major features of that model.¹ It is a syllabic alphabet whose basic unit is the consonant-based syllable with an inherent [a] vowel.

Tamil is written horizontally from left to right and its basic set of symbols consists of 23 consonants² and 12 vowels. In sharp contrast to many other Indic scripts which strictly adhere to the Brahmic model, Tamil uses a reduced repertoire of consonants which reflects its phonology. For example, the Tamil syllabary includes no symbols for aspirated consonants since these sounds do not occur in Tamil. It is interesting to note that Tamil does not explicitly distinguish voiced and unvoiced consonants from the same place of articulation. For instance, [k] and [g] are represented by the same symbol. At the beginning of a word, vowels appear in initial form. When used to replace the inherent vowel of a consonantal syllable, vowels appear in diacritic (or satellite) form before, after, above, below or surrounding the modified syllable. Although certain consonant-vowel combinations can be written as special ligatures, Tamil requires fewer such special symbols than most Indic scripts. Consonant clusters, a series of consonants without intervening vowels, are indicated by suppressing the inherent vowels of all the symbols except the last. Known as pulli, the vowel suppressor takes the shape of a superscript dot and is also used to show the absence of word-final vowels. The aytam, another special symbol, is used to extend the consonant repertoire to accommodate foreign loanwords which have been incorporated in Tamil. Although Tamil has a native set of symbols for numerals, including symbols for 100 and 1000, nowadays Arabic numbers are often used. It is notable that Tamil has no native symbol for zero. European punctuation is used.

¹ For a fuller description of the features of Brahmi-derived scripts, see 'Devanagari'.

² The number of consonants is often cited as 18 since some of the Grantha symbols are not considered part of the basic set.

Copyright © 1997-2000 Agfa Monotype Corporation. All rights reserved. All other trademarks the property of their respective owners.