Marathi phonology

Vowels in native words are:

There are no nasal vowels.

Like other alphasyllabaries, Devanagari writes out syllables by adding vowel diacritics to consonant bases. The table below includes all the vowel symbols used in Marathi, along with a transliteration of each sound into Latin script and IPA.

Marathi furthermore contrasts /əi, əu/ with /ai, au/.

There are two more vowels in Marathi to denote the pronunciations of English words such as of /æ/ in act and /ɔ/ in all. These are written as ⟨अ‍ॅ⟩ and ⟨ऑ⟩.

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 ⟨अं⟩ [əⁿ], ⟨ऐ⟩ [əi], and ⟨औ⟩ [əu]. However, as was done in Gujarati, Marathi speakers tend to pronounce ऋ ṛ somewhat similar to [ru], unlike most other Indic languages which changed it to [ri] (e.g. the original Sanskrit pronunciation of the language's name was saṃskṛtam, while in day-to-day Marathi and Gujarati it is saṃskrut. In other Indic languages, it is closer to sanskrit). 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.

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.

A defining feature of the Marathi language is the frequent substitution of the consonant ल (la) in Sanskrit words with the retroflex lateral flap ळ (ḷa). For instance, कुळ (kuḷa) for the Sanskrit कुलम् (kulam 'clan') and कमळ (kamaḷ) for Sanskrit कमलम् (kamalam 'lotus'). ळ is possibly an import in Marathi from Dravidian languages, although it may also have originated from Vedic Sanskrit.

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

• Marathi language sounds