Marathi phonology

Vowels in native words are: There is almost no phonemic length distinction, even though it is indicated in the script. Some educated speakers try to maintain a length distinction in learned borrowings (tatsamas) from Sanskrit. Unlike Konkani or Hindustani, there are no phonemic nasal vowels in Marathi. Marathi only has four phonemic diphthongs: . There are two more vowel signs used when writing Marathi to denote the pronunciations of English words such as of in act and in all. These are written as and . Furthermore, and occur as allophones of , with words such as (') being pronounced as rather than and others such as (') being pronounced as . Marathi retains several features of Sanskrit that have been lost in other Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi and Bengali, especially in terms of pronunciation of vowels and consonants. For instance, Marathi retains the original diphthong qualities of , and which became monophthongs in Hindi. However, similar to speakers of Western Indo-Aryan languages and Dravidian languages, Marathi speakers tend to pronounce syllabic consonant ऋ as , unlike Northern Indo-Aryan languages which changed it to (e.g. the original Sanskrit pronunciation of the language's name-root '''' was , while in day-to-day Marathi it is ; in the aforementioned Northern Indo-Aryan languages, it is ). While Marathi has also undegone schwa deletion like other Indo-Aryan languages in word-final positions, it has conserved the schwas after consonant clusters in words like (, word) and also reintroduced it for certain words. == Consonants ==

Notes • Marathi used to have a but it merged with . • Unlike in Hindustani, Marathi does not contrast /ɖ/ and /ɽ/ or /ɖʱ/ and /ɽʱ/. Instead, the pairs are conditional allophones, being realized as stops in word-initial or post-nasal positions and as flaps in all other positions. Furthermore, palatalization is only denoted for () in writing through the usage of the eyelash reph/raphar, further complicating analysis. The following table gives two minimal pairs (in Standard Marathi) as examples: Additionally, an anusvara may be pronounced as a nasalized approximant in certain locations. When preceding (), (), (), (), or (), it is rendered as . For example, the words (, 'doubt') and (, 'protection') are pronounced as and respectively. Before (), the anusvara is rendered as : for example, (, 'joint') is pronounced as . Some dialects tend to simplify consonant clusters that are otherwise plentiful in standard Marathi. This might be an adaptation to a faster speaking pace. For example, in the region surrounding Satara, "त्यांच्यासाठी" is often pronounced as "त्यांसनी", eliminating the "chya" cluster. == References ==