Marathi phonology

The phoneme inventory of the Marathi language is similar to that of many other Indo-Aryan languages. An IPA chart of all contrastive sounds in Marathi is provided below.

Vowels

Vowels in native words are:

	Front	Central	Back
High
Mid
Low

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 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 कळ being pronounced as rather than and others such as महाराज 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 . 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 शब्द and also reintroduced it for certain words.

Consonants

Notes

Marathi used to have a but it merged with.
Some speakers pronounce as fricatives but the aspiration is maintained in.
Spoken Marathi in Marathwada-Vidarbha regions frequently simplifies the retroflexes /ɳ/, and /ʂ/ to /n/ and /s/; for example, आणि will be pronounced as instead of.
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.

In Marathi, the Indo-Aryan split into a retroflex lateral flap when singular and alveolar when doubled. It shares this feature with Odia, Punjabi, Gujarati, and other Western Indo-Aryan languages. For example, Sanskrit, 'clan' becomes and Sanskrit, 'lotus' becomes , Sanskrit, Marathi. Another source is from sporadic, e.g. Sanskrit, 'pomegranate', '16', Marathi. Marathi may have gotten due to the areal influence of the neighbouring Dravidian languages; there are some words loaned from Kannada like from but most of the words are native. Vedic Sanskrit also had, but they merged with by the time of classical Sanskrit, these are unrelated to modern IA.
Palatalization is phonemic for some consonants, but it has not been well studied. Furthermore, palatalization is only denoted for र in writing through the usage of the eyelash reph/raphar, further complicating analysis. The following table gives two minimal pairs as examples:

Consonant Cluster	IPA	Palatalized	IPA
तुल्य		बाहुल्या
दर्या		दऱ्या

Additionally, an anusvara may be pronounced as a nasalized approximant in certain locations. When preceding श, ष, स, ह, or र, it is rendered as. For example, the words संशय and संरक्षण are pronounced as and respectively. Before य, the anusvara is rendered as : for example, संयुक्त 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, "त्यांच्यासाठी" is often pronounced as "त्यांसनी", eliminating the "chya" cluster.