| The language situation prevailing in this area forces the Uralis to restrict their speech variety only to the domain of family and intra tribal interactional purposes. Moreover, since Urali is not written, this speech form exists only in oral literature. Upon careful observation, it is possible to describe the speech variety into various categories, namely, the speech of the older generation and of the females who have lesser contact with the outside world on the one hand and other male adults who have a range of varying contacts with other communities. Hence certain special features of Urali are retained in the speech of the old and of the women. Also, their intonational pattern shows much deviation from that of Tamil and Kannada. The speech variety of the younger generation does not show these peculiar features and its inclination is towards the dominant language (Here it is Tamil). |
| i) |
At the phonological level, Tamil, Urali and Irula share the five vowel phonemes /a,e,i,o,u/ ad their long counterparts /a:, e:, i:, o:, u:/. In addition to this, Irula has additional centralised series of vowel phonemes corresponding to each vowel phoneme and their long counterparts, viz., /ä, ë, ï, ö, ü/ and /ä:, ë:, ï:, ö:, ü:/. In the case of Urali also centralised vowel phonemes are observed, but also noticed are certain irregularities in the pattern. For example, Urali does not have two centralised vowel phonemes, /ï/ and /ö/ and their long counterparts in its phonemic system thus leaving a `structural hole’ in the phonemic pattern. In Urali, the above mentioned vowel sounds are pushed to the allophonic level. Also, it is revealed that compared to Irula the frequency of the lexical items involving centralised vowels is very much less in Urali. In the data collected, no lexical item has either /ü/ or /ü:/ in the word initial position. |
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Taking certain characteristics of Urali into consideration, it is possible to speculate that it is in the process of losing the centralised character of the vowels from its phonemic system and that it may develop into a speech variety with only five short vowels. /a,e,i,o,u/ and their long counterparts in its phonemic system, just as most of the other South Dravidian languages. |
| ii) |
In the present day Tamil dialects /u/ in word final position is uniformly pronounced as [ω] with a spread quality. It is a feature not found in Irual and in Urali it is predominantly noticed. |
| iii) |
Voicing is phonemic in Urali and Irula but it is not phonomic in Tamil. |
| iv) |
Urali has /s/ in its phonemic system whereas Tamil and Irula have this sound only in this allophonic level. |
| v) |
Urali and Irula have both /l/ and  / as phonemes, but Tamil, in addition to these two sounds has / / also in its overall pattern. In Urali [l] is not at all found. |
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