Tamil ⇄ English letters, both ways.

How the transliteration works

Tamil script is an abugida: each consonant carries a built-in "a" sound, vowel signs change it, and a dot on top (the புள்ளி (pulli) ‘dot’) removes the vowel. This tool reads Tamil letter by letter and writes it in plain English letters using the same scheme as everything on Bumi: no accents, long vowels doubled (aa, ee, oo), and zh for ழ (zha) ‘the curled-tongue "zh" sound’, as in தமிழ் (tamizh) ‘Tamil’.

Tamil stops change sound with their position, and the romanization follows the sound you actually hear. The letter க (ka) ‘ka’ is "k" at the start of a word but "g" between vowels, so மகன் (magan) ‘son’ is written magan, not makan. Doubled letters stay hard: அக்கா (akka) ‘older sister’.

Typing Tamil with English letters

Going the other way is harder, because English letters merge sounds Tamil keeps apart. "n" can be three Tamil letters, "l" two and "r" two. The tool picks the most common letter for each position and lets you override it:

• N (capital) gives ண (Na) ‘retroflex n’, L gives ள (La) ‘retroflex l’, R gives ற (Ra) ‘hard r’.
• zh gives ழ (zha) ‘zha’, ng gives ங்க (nga) ‘nga’, nj gives ஞ்ச (nja) ‘nja’.
• E and O (capitals) give the long vowels ஏ (E) ‘long e’ and ஓ (O) ‘long o’.

Words that the rules can't reverse on their own, like place names, come from a word list built from Bumi's vocabulary list.

What it doesn't do

This is transliteration, not translation: it changes the letters, not the language. For meaning, every word on our free tools and in the Learn guides comes with an English gloss. Romanized Tamil also can't show every distinction the script makes, which is one reason it's worth learning the script eventually.