Some educated speakers try to maintain a length distinction in learned borrowings (tatsamas) from Sanskrit.
The most prevalent allophone is ɤ, which results in कळ (kaḷa) being more commonly pronounced as [kɤːɺ̢ ] rather than [kəɺ̢ ].
[3] Marathi retains several features of Sanskrit that have been lost in other Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi and Bengali, especially in terms of pronunciation of vowels and consonants.
For instance, Marathi retains the original diphthong qualities of ⟨ऐ⟩ [əi], and ⟨औ⟩ [əu] which became monophthongs in Hindi.
Spoken Marathi allows for conservative stress patterns in words like शब्द (śabda) with an emphasis on the ending vowel sound, a feature that has been lost in Hindi due to Schwa deletion.