The sound system of Oriya shares many features with other Indo-Aryan languages.

Vowels
Oriya has the following vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. Most vowels can be short on long. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning.

x	Front	Central	Back
High (close)	i - ī	x	u - ū
Mid	e - ē	x	o - ō
Low (open)	x	a --ā

Consonants
Oriya has 28 consonant phonemes.

• There is a contrast between aspirated vs. unaspirated stops and affricates, e.g., p—p, t—t, k—k, Aspirated consonants are produced with a strong puff of air.
• Most consonants can be geminated (doubled).
• There is a contrast between apical and retroflex consonants, e.g., Apical consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, whereas retroflex consonants are produced with the tongue curled, so that its underside comes in contact with the roof of the mouth.
• There are several nasal consonants, including m, n, (retroflex), and (as in sing).
• Consonant clusters are permitted mostly in medial and final positions. Initial clusters are infrequent and, for the most part, consist of a consonant + /r/.

..xx	.xx	Bilabial	Apico-dental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Alveo-palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops voiceless	unaspirated	p	t	x		x	k	x
	aspirated	p	t	x		x	k	x
Stops voiced	unaspirated	b	d	x		x	g	x
	aspirated	b	d			x	g	x
Fricatives	voiceless	x	xx	s	x			h
Nasals	x	m	x	n		x		x
Laterals	x	......x	l	x		x.....	...x	x
Flap	x	..x.... .x	r .	x		....	...x	x
Semi-vowels	.x	w	.xx	x	.x	j	.x	x

Stress
Stress in Oriya generally falls on the penultimate syllable of a word.

Click here to hear Voyager's greeting from Earth in Oriya.
Click here to listen to Pratibha Ray, an Oriya writer, read from her works in Oriya.

The grammar of Oriya is very much like that of other Indo-Aryan languages. Like all these languages, Oriya is agglutinative, i.e., it adds suffixes to roots to build words and to express grammatical relations.

Nouns
Oriya nouns are marked for the following grammatical categories: genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, instrumental, locative).

• number: singular and plural
• gender: masculine, feminine
• case: nominative, genitive, accusative-dative, instrumental, ablative, locative, and vocative; all cases, except vocative, are marked by postpositions; the vocative case may be marked by a vocative particle or term of address;
• there are no definite or indefinite articles
• adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case

Verbs
Oriya verbs agree with their subjects (in the active voice), or with their objects (in the passive voice) in person, number and gender. Verbs are marked for the following categories:

• There are three persons: 1st, 2nd, 2nd honorific, 3rd.
• There are two numbers: singular and plural;
• There are three tenses: present, past, future.
• There are two aspects: imperfective and perfective.
• There are three moods: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, conditional
• There are two voices: active and passive.

Word order
The normal word order in Oriya is Subject - Object - Verb. Modifiers precede the nouns they modify. Indirect objects precede direct objects.

Most of Oriya's vocabulary derives from Sanskrit. The language also has loanwords from Persian, Arabic and from the Austronesian languages spoken by spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient Kalinga empire whose territory comprised most of the state of Orissa and parts of the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh.

Below are Oriya numerals 1-10 in Romanization.