WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Tamil
Tamil gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, and a written unit is often several keystrokes in a fixed order rather than one — 29 distinct characters turn up across 42 practice words. Tamil is typed on the Tamil 99 layout.
Among the oldest continuously written languages in the world, with inscriptions going back more than two thousand years. Its consonant inventory is notably compact — 18, where Sanskrit-derived scripts typically have more than 30 — because Tamil does not distinguish aspirated from unaspirated in writing and lets context decide. The Tamil 99 layout was designed for the language rather than adapted from a pan-Indic standard.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 29 distinct characters across 42 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Tamil keyboard layout
- Tamil 99
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 20 of the 29 characters its practice words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ்31
- ம16
- வ12
- ு12
- ர11
- க10
- ல10
- ி10
- ந9
- த7
The longest practice word in this script is அவர்கள் in Tamil.
The one language written in Tamil
Other writing systems
- Telugu A rounded script closely related to Kannada; the two were a single script until roughly the fifteenth century and remain similar enough that readers of one can often puzzle out the other.
- Thai Forty-four consonants, around 28 vowel forms and four tone marks, written without spaces between words — spaces mark the ends of clauses instead, which makes working out where one word ends a job for the reader and a well-known hard problem for software.
- Latin The most widely used alphabet in the world, and the one your keyboard is built around.
There is a written guide for this script: Typing Tamil: the layout that did not join InScript. Every other Indian script here shares one arrangement. Tamil designed its own, and the reasons are about the language rather than about politics.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.