This paper investigates the claim of rhoticity of the fifth liquid in Malayalam using various acoustic characteristics. The Malayalam liquid phonemes are analyzed in terms of the smoothness of the pitch window, formants, formant bandwidth, the effect on surrounding vowels, duration, and classification patterns by an unrelated classifier. We report, for the fifth liquid, a slight similarity in terms of pitch smoothness with one of the laterals, similarity with the laterals in terms of F1 for males, and similarity with the laterals and one of the rhotics in terms of F1 for females. The similarity in terms of formant bandwidth between the fifth liquid and the other liquids is inconclusive. Similarly, the effect of the fifth liquid on the surrounding vowels is inconclusive. No similarity is observed between the fifth liquid and the other liquids in phoneme duration. Classification of the fifth liquid section implies higher order signal level similarity with both laterals and rhotics.