aːi̯, au̯, ei̯, oi̯, i̯a/ as in kai, vāypa, auṣadhaṁ, cey, koy and kāryaṁ Vowel length is phonemic and all of the vowels have minimal pairs for example paṭṭŭ "silk", pāṭṭŭ "song", koḍi "flag", kōḍi "crore" (10 million), er̠i "throw", ēr̠i "lots" Some speakers also have /æː/, /ɔː/, /ə/ from English loanwords e.g. /bæːŋgɨ̆/ "bank" but most speakers switch it with /aː/, /eː/ or /ja/; /oː/ or /aː/ and /e/ or /a/. (See Manglish (Malayalam)) Consonants As in other Dravidian languages, the retroflex series are true subapical consonants, in which the underside of the tongue contacts the roof. All of the alveolars except /s/ are apical. /, , , , / can either be postalveolar or alveolo-palatal depending upon the speaker and dialect; the postalveolar and alveolo-palatal realizations are in free variation. The alveolar nasal once had a separate character ⟨ഩ⟩ that is now obsolete and the sound is now almost always represented by the symbol that was originally used only for the dental nasal. However, both sounds are extensively used in current colloquial and official Malayalam, and although they were allophones in Old Malayalam, they now occasionally contrast in gemination – for example, ('by me', first person singular pronoun in the instrumental case) and ('if that is so'), which are both written (എന്നാൽ). The unaspirated alveolar stop also had a separate character ⟨ഺ⟩ but it has become obsolete, as the sound only occurs in geminate form (when geminated it is written with a below another ⟨റ്റ⟩) or immediately following other consonants (in these cases, or are usually written in small size underneath the first consonant). The proto Dravidian alveolar stop *ṯ developed into an alveolar trill /r/ in many of the Dravidian languages while *ṯṯ and *ṉṯ remained in Malayalam. ന്റ is pronounced only as n̠d̠ but ൻറ can be pronounced as n̠d̠ or n̠r̠, n̠r̠ doesn't occur natively but it occurs in loans like എൻറോൾ (en̠r̠ōḷ) 'enroll' or ഹെൻറി (hen̠r̠i) 'Henry'. All non geminated voiceless stops and affricate become voiced in intervocalic position like in Tamil but unlike Tamil it doesn't spirantize, it remains a stop; e.g. makaṉ Ml. [mɐgɐn] Ta. [mɐɣɐn]; it also gets voiced after a nasal. The geminated velars /k:/ and /ŋ:/ are sometimes palatalized word medially after /j, i(:), e(:)/ like in the words [kiɖɐk:ugɐ] vs [iɾikʲ:ugɐ] and [mɐŋ:ɐl] vs. [mɐt̪:ɐŋʲ:ɐ], their distribution is unpredictable e.g. it doesn't palatalize in vikkŭ but does in