Only in Nara 35
What this means for learners
Nara and Tamil share 24 sounds — roughly 41% of Tamil's inventory overlaps with Nara. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 19 sounds found only in Tamil represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Nara speakers. The adult brain tends to map unfamiliar sounds onto the closest native equivalent — a process that produces the characteristic "accent" of a second-language speaker. Learning to hear and produce these sounds as distinct requires focused ear training, not just repetition.
Conversely, Nara has 35 sounds not used in Tamil. Native Tamil speakers learning Nara will face the mirror-image challenge with these sounds.
Phoneme inventories from PHOIBLE. Data reflects one documented inventory per language; some variation exists across dialects and sources.