Malayalam letter zha

It is Malayalam’s zha consonant, made with the tongue tip curled back.

Curl the tip of your tongue back toward the roof of your mouth without touching it. The sound keeps flowing; it is distinct from Malayalam’s l ല, retroflex l ള, and r-like consonant റ.

When Malayalam is written in Latin letters, guides use zha; scholarly writing also uses ḻ for the same sound.

Where did this letter come from?

It developed through southern Dravidian writing traditions over time.

The earliest relevant trail runs through Tamil-Brahmi, an early way to write Tamil adapted from Brahmi, an older Indian script. It added signs for Dravidian sounds missing from the inherited set and is attested by the middle of the third century BCE. The Old Tamil sound represented in scholarly writing as ḻ appears in inscriptions from the first centuries CE; those examples do not establish the modern Malayalam letter’s exact outline.

Malayalam developed separately on India’s west coast. Old Malayalam grew from a west-coast form of Middle Tamil and is attested in Kerala by the mid-ninth century CE. It was written mainly in Vatteluttu, a rounded script, with some Grantha letters added.

How do I type ഴ?

On Malayalam InScript, press B for ഴ.

For a bare consonant, add the virama—the Malayalam mark that cancels the built-in vowel—after it: B then d gives ഴ്. For a cluster, type consonant, virama, then the next consonant; ഴ്ച is a documented example. Vowel signs follow the base letter even when they appear elsewhere in the written form. Microsoft’s 2024 Windows instructions list InScript as the default Malayalam layout, with Malayalam Phonetic also available.