Malayalam speech sounds and their mapping to Unicode symbols: a case study

This paper deals with problems in the representation of phonetic symbols of Malayalam language on HTML pages. These symbols are not normally available on a computer keyboard. In many cases it used to be written by hand and only a few symbols were available in the insert mode in word processors, and often they were not compatible with HTML packages. This paper focuses on the phonemes and allophones of Malayalam and their transliteration and presentation on the Web. The outcome of the study is a table consisting of Malayalam phonetic symbols with their respective Unicode numbers and an explanation of utility. This study is helpful in the usage of Unicode for representing Indian language fonts at all levels such as in language teaching materials, creating Web documents in descriptive linguistics, and converting the printed documents to digital resources.