Malayalam മലയാളം malayāḷaṁ |
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Spoken in: | India | |||
Region: | Kerala, Lakshadweep, Mahé, Puducherry, Arabian Peninsula, Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai and the United States. | |||
Total speakers: | 37,198,000.[1] 35,351,000 in India, 1,800,000 in the Persian Gulf, 37,000[2] in Malaysia, and 10,000 in Singapore |
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Ranking: | 29 | |||
Language family: | Dravidian Southern Tamil-Kannada Tamil-Kodagu Tamil-Malayalam Malayalam |
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Writing system: | Malayalam script, historically written in Vattezhuthu script, Kolezhuthu script , Karzoni script. Also Arabic script (Arabi Malayalam) | |||
Official status | ||||
Official language in: | ![]() |
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Regulated by: | No official regulation | |||
Language codes | ||||
ISO 639-1: | ml | |||
ISO 639-2: | mal | |||
ISO 639-3: | mal | |||
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Malayalam (മലയാളം malayāḷaṁ) is a Dravidian language used predominantly in the state of Kerala, in southern India. It is one of the 22 official languages of India, and it is used by around 36 million people.[1] Malayalam is also widely used in the union territories of Lakshadweep and Mahé, the Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu and the Kodagu[1] and Dakshina Kannada districts of Karnataka. It is also used by a large population of Indian expatriates living in Arab States, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.
Malayalam began developing a body of literature by the 9th century AD.[3] The language uses a large proportion of Sanskrit vocabulary. Loans have also been made from Portuguese, Arabic and, in more recent times, English.
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The term "Malayalam" comes from the words mala (Mountain), alam (Place). Hence malayali means Mountain people who lived beyond the Western Ghats, and Malayalam the language that was spoken there.
Another etymology is that it comes from mala (Mountain) and azham (Ocean) - referring to the Sahya mountains and Arabian Sea that bound Kerala. Malayazham later became Malayalam.
The word "Malayalam" is an apparent palindrome. However, strictly, it is not, for three reasons: the next to last vowel is long and should properly be spelled double or written ā (an a with a macron); the 'l' consonants represent different sounds, the first being dental ([l], Malayalam ല, Roman l) (although the consonant chart below lists that sound as [alveolar]) and the second retroflex ([ɭ], Malayalam ള, Roman ḷ); and the final 'm' is a mark of nasalization, unlike the initial 'm', which is a full consonant.
The language belongs to the family of Dravidian languages. There are conflicting theories concerning the origin of the language. Robert Caldwell, in his book A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Languages considers Malayalam an ancient off-shoot of classical Tamil that over time gained a large amount of Sanskrit vocabulary and lost the personal terminations of verbs.[4] However, linguists like Hermann Gundert regard Malayalam as having diverged from Proto-Tamil-Malayalam, or Proto-Dravidian. Malayalam has a script of its own, covering special letters to write Sanskrit words as well as letters for Dravidian-specific sounds. Recent archaeological evidence points to Malayalam being as old a language as the other Dravidian languages and that it evolved over the centuries, with its versions having different names.
Together with Tamil, Toda, Kannada and Tulu, Malayalam belongs to the southern group of Dravidian languages. In fact Malayalam is more related to Tulu than any other languages. Proto-Tamil-Malayalam, the common stock of Tamil and Malayalam, apparently diverged over a period of four or five centuries from the ninth century on, resulting in the emergence of Malayalam as a language distinct from Proto-Tamil. As the language of scholarship and administration, Proto-Tamil greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam. Later the irresistible inroads the Namboothiris made into the cultural life of Kerala, the Namboothiri-Nair dominated social & political setup, the trade relationships with Arabs, and the invasion of Kerala by the Portuguese, establishing vassal states accelerated the assimilation of many Romance, Semitic and Indo-Aryan features into Malayalam at different levels spoken by different castes and religious communities like Muslims, Christians, Jews and Jainas.
T.K. Krishna Menon, in his book "A Primer of Malayalam Literature" describes four distinct epochs concerning the evolution of the language:[5]
The earliest written record of Malayalam is the Vazhappalli inscription (ca. 830 CE). The early literature of Malayalam comprised three types of composition:
Malayalam poetry to the late twentieth century betrays varying degrees of the fusion of the three different strands. The oldest examples of Pattu and Manipravalam, respectively, are Ramacharitam and Vaishikatantram, both of the twelfth century.
The earliest extant prose work in the language is a commentary in simple Malayalam, Bhashakautaliyam (12th century) on Chanakya’s Arthasastra. Adhyathmaramayanam by Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan (known as the father of the Malayalam language) who was born in Tirur, one of the most important works in Malayalam literature. Malayalam prose of different periods exhibit various levels of influence from different languages such as Tamil, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Hebrew, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English. Although this may be true, Malayalam is strikingly similar to Tamil, considerably more than the similarity between modern Dutch and German. Modern literature is rich in poetry, fiction, drama, biography, and literary criticism.
For the consonants and vowels, the IPA is given, followed by the Malayalam character and the ISO 15919 transliteration.
Short | Long | |||||
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Front | Central | Back | Front | Central | Back | |
Close | /i/ ഇ i | /ɨ̆/ * ŭ | /u/ ഉ u | /iː/ ഈ ī | /uː/ ഊ ū | |
Mid | /e/ എ e | /ə/ * a | /o/ ഒ o | /eː/ ഏ ē | /oː/ ഓ ō | |
Open | /a/ അ a | /aː/ ആ ā |
Malayalam has also borrowed the Sanskrit diphthongs of /äu/ (represented in Malayalam as ഔ, au) and /ai/ (represented in Malayalam as ഐ, ai), although these mostly occur only in Sanskrit loanwords. Traditionally (as in Sanskrit), four vocalic consonants (usually pronounced in Malayalam as consonants followed by the samvr̥tokāram, which is not officially a vowel, and not as actual vocalic consonants) have been classified as vowels: vocalic r (ഋ, /rɨ̆/, r̥), long vocalic r (ൠ, /rɨː/, r̥̄), vocalic l (ഌ, /lɨ̆/, l̥) and long vocalic l (ൡ, /lɨː/, l̥̄). Except for the first, the other three have been omitted from the current script used in Kerala as there are no words in current Malayalam that use them.
Bilabial | Labiodental | Dental | Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||||||
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Stop | Unaspirated | /p/ പ p | /b/ ബ b | /t̪/ ത t | /d̪/ ദ d | /t/ * t | /ʈ/ ട ṭ | /ɖ/ ഡ ḍ | /ʧ/ ച c | /ʤ/ ജ j | /k/ ക k | /g/ ഗ g | ||||||
Aspirated | /pʰ/ ഫ ph | /bʱ/ ഭ bh | /t̪ʰ/ ഥ th | /d̪ʱ/ ധ dh | /ʈʰ/ ഠ ṭh | /ɖʱ/ ഢ ḍh | /ʧʰ/ ഛ ch | /ʤʱ/ ഝ jh | /kʰ/ ഖ kh | /gʱ/ ഘ gh | ||||||||
Nasal | /m/ മ m | /n̪/ ന n | /n/ ന * n | /ɳ/ ണ ṇ | /ɲ/ ഞ ñ | /ŋ/ ങ ṅ | ||||||||||||
Approximant | /ʋ/ വ v | /ɻ/ ഴ l | /j/ യ y | |||||||||||||||
Liquid | /r/ റ r | |||||||||||||||||
Fricative | /f/ ഫ* f | /s̪/ സ s | /ʂ/ ഷ ṣ | /ɕ/ ശ ś | /ɦ/ ഹ h | |||||||||||||
Tap | /ɾ/ ര r | |||||||||||||||||
Lateral approximant | /l/ ല l | /ɭ/ ള ḷ |
In the early ninth century vattezhuthu (round writing) traceable through the Grantha script, to the pan-Indian Brahmi script, gave rise to the Malayalam writing system. It is syllabic in the sense that the sequence of graphic elements means that syllables have to be read as units, though in this system the elements representing individual vowels and consonants are for the most part readily identifiable. In the 1960s Malayalam dispensed with many special letters representing less frequent conjunct consonants and combinations of the vowel /u/ with different consonants.
Malayalam language script consists of 51 letters including 16 vowels and 37 consonants.[6] The earlier style of writing is now substituted with a new style from 1981. This new script reduces the different letters for typeset from 900 to fewer than 90. This was mainly done to include Malayalam in the keyboards of typewriters and computers.
In 1999 a group called Rachana Akshara Vedi, led by Chitrajakumar, and K.H. Hussein, produced a set of free fonts containing the entire character repertoire of more than 900 glyphs. This was announced and released along with an editor in the same year at Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of Kerala. In 2004, the fonts were released under the GNU GPL license by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation at the Cochin University of Science and Technology in Kochi, Kerala.
Variations in intonation patterns, vocabulary, and distribution of grammatical and phonological elements are observable along the parameters of region, religion, community, occupation, social stratum, style and register. Influence of Sanskrit is very prominent in formal Malayalam used in literature. Malayalam has a substantially high amount of Sanskrit loan words.[7]
Loan words and influences also from Hebrew, Syriac and Ladino abound in the Jewish Malayalam dialects, as well as English, Portuguese, Syriac and Greek in the Christian dialects, while Arabic and Persian elements predominate in the Muslim dialects (Mappila Malayalam, Beary bashe).
When words are adopted from Sanskrit, their endings are usually changed to conform to Malayalam norms:
Malayalam also has been influenced by Portuguese, as is evident from the use of words like mesa for a small table, and janala for window.[10]
For a comprehensive list of loan words, see Loan words in Malayalam.
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