Malayalam (pronounced /mæləˈjɑːləm/; മലയാളം, malayāḷam ?), is one of the four major Dravidian languages of southern India. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India with official language status in the state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry. It is spoken by 35.9 million people.[1] Malayalam is also spoken in the Nilgiris district, Kanyakumari district and Coimbatore of Tamil Nadu, Dakshina Kannada, Bangalore and Kodagu districts of Karnataka.[1][5][6][7] Overseas it is also used by a large population of Indian expatriates living around the globe in the Middle East, North America, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and Europe.The language Malayalam is alternatively called as Alealum, Malayalani, Malayali, Malean, Maliyad, Mallealle, and Mopla.[8]
Malayalam most likely originated from ancient Tamil in the 6th century, of which Modern Tamil was also derived.[9] An alternative theory proposes a split in even more ancient times.[9] In either case, Malayalam was heavily Sanskritised through the ages and today over eighty percent of the words of modern Malayalam are from pure Sanskrit.[10][11][12] Before Malayalam came into being, Old Tamil was used in literature and courts of a region called Tamilakam, a famous example being Silappatikaram. While Dravidian Tamil used to be the ruling language of the Chera Dynasty[13] and Pandyan kingdoms.[14] Sanskrit/Prakrit derived Buddhist Pali Language and the Jain Kalpasutra were known to Keralites from 500 BC. The Grantha Bhasha or Sanskrit mixed Tamil which was written in Grantha Script (Arya Ezhuthu) was used by Brahmins residing in Tamil areas.[15] The Dravidian component of Malayalam-Tamil has words similar to ancient Sangam Literature. During the Later Chera dynasty the inscriptions included some lines from Grantha Bhasha in Grantha Script along with Malayalam-Tamil written in Vattezhuttu. The oldest literature works in Malayalam, distinct from the Tamil tradition, is dated certainly to the 11th century, perhaps to the 9th century.[9] For cultural purposes Malayalam and Sanskrit formed a language known as Manipravalam, where both languages were used in an alternating style. Malayalam is the only among the major Dravidian languages without diglossia. This means, that the Malayalam which is spoken doesn't differ from the written variant, while the Kannada and Tamil languages use a classical type for the latter.
The word "Malayalam" is spelled as a palindrome in English. However, it is not a palindrome in its own script, for three reasons: the third a is long and should properly be transliterated aa or ā (an a with a macron) while the other a’s are short; the two l consonants represent different sounds, the first l being dental ([l̪], 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 written as an anusvara, which denotes the same phoneme /m/ as in the initial m in this case, but the two m’s are spelled differently (the first m is a normal ma മ with an inherent vowel a, while the last m ം is a pure consonant).
