They then maintained the terms, as Old Indo-Aryan had also developed contrastive retroflex consonants.
When, as a result of close contact, Dravidian words with retroflex consonants were borrowed, they too could be taken into Indo-Aryan without changing the retroflex consonants to dentals.
In Russian the sounds sh, zh (like the English s sound in "pleasure"), and shch are retroflex; there are also many retroflex consonants in the languages of India.
Like the other Dravidian languages, Tamil is characterized by a series of retroflex consonants (/ḍ/, /ṇ/, and /ṭ/) made by curling the tip of the tongue back to the roof of the mouth.
Like the other Dravidian languages, Telugu has a series of retroflex consonants (/ḍ/, /ṇ/, and /ṭ/) pronounced with the tip of the tongue curled back against the roof of the mouth.
The first is between retroflex consonants (pronounced with the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, giving a hard sound of the kind associated with Indian pronunciations of words like 'doctor'), and dental consonants (pronounced with the tongue touching the upper teeth, giving a soft sound as in an Italian pronunciation of 'Italia').
The r sound was assimilated to following dental sounds (l, n, s, t, d) to make a series of retroflex consonants (ḷ, ṇ, ṣ, ṭ, ḍ, pronounced with the tip of the tongue curled up toward the hard palate) in many Swedish and Norwegian dialects, including those of Oslo and Stockholm.
The language uses typical Dravidian retroflex consonants (sounds pronounced with the tip of the tongue curled back against the roof of the mouth), such as /ḍ/, /ṇ/, and /ṭ/, as well as a series of voiced and voiceless aspirates borrowed from the Indo-Aryan language family.
In many dialects, sequences of /r/ with a dental consonant result in retroflex consonants.
Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of retroflex consonants and multiple rhotics.
