character and the ISO 15919 transliteration. The current Malayalam script bears high similarity with Tigalari script, which was used for writing the Tulu language, spoken in coastal Karnataka (Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts) and the northernmost Kasargod district of Kerala. Tigalari script was also used for writing Sanskrit in Malabar region. Vowels ്* formed from word final short /u/s but now there are /u/s finally as well, mostly in loanwords like in guru but native pērŭ; It is also added to the end of loanwords ending in some consonants, e.g. Skt. manas, suhr̥t, Ml. manassŭ, suhr̥ttŭ, En. current Ml. karaṇḍŭ. It is the , an epenthentic vowel in Malayalam. Therefore, it has no independent vowel letter (because it never occurs at the beginning of words) but, when it comes after a consonant, there are various ways of representing it. In medieval times, it was just represented with the symbol for ⟨⟩, but later on it was just completely omitted (that is, written as an inherent vowel ⟨⟩, thus, pērŭ was once written as pēra). In modern times, it is written in two different ways – the Northern style, in which a chandrakkala is used ⟨⟩, and the Southern or Travancore style, in which the diacritic for a is attached to the preceding consonant and a chandrakkala is written above ⟨⟩. According to one author, this alternative form ⟨⟩ is historically more correct, though the simplified form without a vowel sign u is common nowadays. * (phonetically central: ) is represented as basic or the "default" vowel in the Abugida script. Malayalam has also borrowed the Sanskrit diphthongs of (represented in Malayalam as , au) and (represented in Malayalam as , ai), although these mostly occur only in Sanskrit loanwords. Traditionally (as in Sanskrit), four vocalic consonants (usually pronounced in Malayalam as consonants followed by the , which is not officially a vowel, and not as actual vocalic consonants) have been classified as vowels: vocalic r (, , r̥), long vocalic r (, , r̥̄), vocalic l (, , l̥) and long vocalic l (, , l̥̄). Except for the first, the other three have been omitted from the current script used in Kerala as there are no words in current Malayalam that use them. Some authors say that Malayalam has no diphthongs and /ai̯, au̯/ are clusters of V+glide j/ʋ while others consider all V+glide clusters to be diphthongs /ai̯,