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Tamil alphabet and characters

The Tamil alphabet should display only the following characters. If your document is not showing correctly, then first check that the encoding for that program and font supports Dravidian languages.

The Tamil language has 37 primary characters which include 18 consonants, 12 vowels, 6 Grantha and 1 Aaytam.

Tamil consonants

Tamil grammar rules

Tamil is an agglutinative language, adding suffixes to nominal and verbal stems to indicate grammatical relations.

Nouns inflect for gender, number and case.

Nouns are of two categories: rational (goods and humans) and irrational (everything else). Rational nouns have two genders (masculine and feminine) and two numbers (singular, plural). Irrational nouns are neuter and have two numbers.

There are 8 cases: nominative, accusative, dative, sociative, genitive, instrumental, locative, ablative.

Tamil formatting rules

Short date formatdd-MM-yyyy
dd-MM-yy
d-M-yy
d.M.yy
yyyy-MM-dd
e.g. 17-08-2016
17-08-16
17-8-16
17.8.16
2017-08-16
Long date formatdd MMMM yyyy
d MMMM yyyy
e.g. 17 ஆகஸ்ட் 2016
7 ஆகஸ்ட் 2016

Tamil capitalisation usage

This section does not apply to Tamil.

Solutions for Tamil

Stepping Stone provides translation and localisation services for Tamil