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Malayalam

Not to be confused with Malay, an Austronesian language.

Malayalam
മലയാളം, malayāḷaṁ
Malayalam in Malayalam script
Pronunciation[mɐlɐjaːɭɐm]; pronunciationⓘ
Native toIndia
RegionSouthern India
EthnicityMalayali
SpeakersL1: 37 million (2011)[4][5][6]
L2: 810,000 (2011)[7]
Total: 38 million (2011)[8]
Dravidian
Early forms
DialectsKasaragod
North Malabar
Wayanad
Kozhikode
Eranad
Valluvanad (South Malabar)
Palakkad
Thrissur-Kochi
North Travancore
West Vembanad
Central Travancore
South Travancore
Lakshadweep
Beary
Ravula[9]
Jeseri
Arabi
Suriyani
Judeo-Malayalam
Byari
Official status
Official language in
Regulated by
Language codes
ISO 639-1ml
ISO 639-2mal
ISO 639-3mal
Glottologmala1464
Linguasphere49-EBE-ba
Blue = majority or plurality speak Malayalam Light blue = A significant minority speak Malayalam or Malayalam languages are spoken alongside other languages
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.
Malayalam is written in a non-Latin script. Malayalam text used in this article is transliterated into the Latin script according to the ISO 15919 standard.
PersonMalayāḷi
PeopleMalayāḷikaḷ
LanguageMalayāḷam
CountryMalayāḷa Nāṭu
A Malayalam speaker, recorded in South Africa

Malayalam (/ˌmæləˈjɑːləm/;[11] മലയാളം, Malayāḷam, IPA: [mɐlɐjaːɭɐm] ⓘ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam was designated a "Classical Language of India" in 2013.[12][13] Malayalam has official language status in Kerala, Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé),[2][3][14] and is also the primary spoken language of Lakshadweep. Malayalam is spoken by 35.6 million people in India.[15] Malayalam is also spoken by linguistic minorities in the neighbouring states; with a significant number of speakers in the Kodagu and Dakshina Kannada districts of Karnataka, and Kanyakumari, Coimbatore and Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu. It is also spoken by the Malayali Diaspora worldwide, especially in the Persian Gulf countries, due to the large populations of Malayali expatriates there. They are a significant population in each city in India including Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad etc.

The origin of Malayalam remains a matter of dispute among scholars. The mainstream view holds that Malayalam descends from a western coastal dialect of early Middle Tamil and separated from it sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries.[16][17] This western dialect also preserved some archaisms suggesting an earlier divergence of the spoken dialects in the prehistoric period. A second view argues for the development of the two languages out of "Proto-Dravidian" or "Proto-Tamil-Malayalam" either in the prehistoric period or in the middle of the first millennium A.D.,[18][19][20] although this is generally rejected by historical linguists.[21] The Quilon Syrian copper plates of 849/850 CE are considered by some to be the oldest available inscription written in Old Malayalam. However, the existence of Old Malayalam is sometimes disputed by scholars.[22] They regard the Chera Perumal inscriptional language as a diverging dialect or variety of contemporary Tamil.[22][23] The oldest extant literary work in Malayalam distinct from the Tamil tradition is Ramacharitam (late 12th or early 13th century).[24]

The earliest script used to write Malayalam was the Vatteluttu script.[17] The current Malayalam script is based on the Vatteluttu script, which was extended with Grantha script letters to adopt Indo-Aryan loanwords.[17][25] It bears high similarity with the Tigalari script, a historical script that was used to write the Tulu language in South Canara, and Sanskrit in the adjacent Malabar region.[26] The modern Malayalam grammar is based on the book Kerala Panineeyam written by A. R. Raja Raja Varma in late 19th century CE.[27] The first travelogue in any Indian language is the Malayalam Varthamanappusthakam, written by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar in 1785.[28][29]

Robert Caldwell describes the extent of Malayalam in the 19th century as extending from the vicinity of Kumbla in the north where it supersedes with Tulu to Kanyakumari in the south, where it begins to be superseded by Tamil,[30] beside the inhabited islands of Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea.

  1. ^ 52nd Report of the Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities in India (PDF). Government of India (Report). 9 August 2021. p. 124. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 August 2023. Retrieved 6 November 2021.
  2. ^ a b "Official Language (Legislative) Commission". Archived from the original on 25 March 2015. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  3. ^ a b "P&ARD Official Languages". Archived from the original on 1 April 2015. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  4. ^ Malayalam at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025) Closed access icon
  5. ^ "Census of India Website : Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India". Archived from the original on 15 August 2018. Retrieved 26 December 2019.
  6. ^ Statement 1: Abstract of speakers' strength of languages and mother tongues – 2011". www.censusindia.gov.in. Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India. [1] Archived 14 November 2018 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ^ Malayalam at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025) Closed access icon
  8. ^ Malayalam at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025) Closed access icon
  9. ^ Subramoniam, V. I. (1997). Dravidian encyclopaedia. vol. 3, Language and literature. Thiruvananthapuram: International School of Dravidian Linguistics. Cit-P-487. Dravidian Encyclopedia Archived 29 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ^ Official languages, UNESCO, archived from the original on 28 September 2005, retrieved 10 May 2007
  11. ^ Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh, p. 300.
  12. ^ "'Classical' status for Malayalam". The Hindu. Thiruvananthapuram, India. 24 May 2013. Archived from the original on 27 September 2013. Retrieved 25 May 2013.
  13. ^ "Malayalam gets classical language status". The Indian Express. 24 May 2013. Archived from the original on 7 September 2021. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  14. ^ "Languages in Lakshadweep". Archived from the original on 11 April 2015. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  15. ^ "Malayalam". Ethnologue. Retrieved 3 March 2024.
  16. ^ Ayyar, Ramaswami (1936). The Evolution of Malayalam Morphology (1st ed.). Cochin, Kerala: Cochin government press. pp. 1–37.
  17. ^ a b c Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-43533-8. Archived from the original on 29 July 2021. Retrieved 16 November 2020.
  18. ^ Asher & Kumari 1997, p. xxiv.
  19. ^ Shulman, David (2016). Tamil: A Biography. Harvard University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1g69zdt. ISBN 978-0-674-05992-4. JSTOR j.ctt1g69zdt."There has been a tendency among historical linguists to think of Malayalam as having diverged directly from Tamil (the Tamil spoken from ancient times in what is today Kerala), perhaps as late as the thirteenth century. But this view is almost certainly wrong. Tamil and Malayalam must have separated from one another at a much earlier stage, perhaps around the middle of the first millennium A.D., as we can see from several surviving archaic features of Malayalam."
  20. ^ Karashima 2014, p. 6: Other sources date this split to the 7th and 8th centuries.
  21. ^ S.V. Shanmugam (1976). "Formation and Development of Malayalam", Indian Literature, Vol. 19, No. 3 (May–June 1976), pp. 5–30. JSTOR 24157306 "Yet, some scholars of Malayalam still believe that Malayalam should have originated independently from the Proto-Dravidian at a very early stage [...] The native scholars are unwilling to accept Malayalam as an ausbau language; instead they take it to be an abstand language 'language by distance' contrary to historical evidence (pp.9–10)".
  22. ^ a b Freeman, Rich (2003). "The Literary Culture of Premodern Kerala". In Sheldon, Pollock (ed.). Literary Cultures in History. University of California Press. pp. 445–46. ISBN 978-0-520-22821-4.
  23. ^ Tintu, K.J. (2019). "The Syrian Christian Copper Plate of Tarisāppaḷḷy, and the Jewish and Muslim Merchants of Early Malabar". Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 80: 184–191. ISSN 2249-1937. JSTOR 27192872.
  24. ^ "Malayalam literature | Facts, Writers, Poetry, & Examples". Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on 21 March 2023. Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  25. ^ Venu Govindaraju; Srirangaraj Setlur (2009). Guide to OCR for Indic Scripts: Document Recognition and Retrieval – Advances in Pattern Recognition. Springer. p. 126. ISBN 978-1-84800-329-3. Archived from the original on 29 April 2016. Retrieved 15 November 2015.
  26. ^ Cite error: The named reference vinodh rajan was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  27. ^ Mathrubhumi Yearbook Plus – 2019 (Malayalam ed.). Kozhikode: P. V. Chandran, Managing Editor, Mathrubhumi Printing & Publishing Company Limited, Kozhikode. 2018. p. 454. ASIN 8182676444.
  28. ^ Menon, A. Sreedhara (2008). The legacy of Kerala (1st DCB ed.). Kottayam, Kerala: D C Books. ISBN 978-81-264-2157-2.
  29. ^ "August 23, 2010 Archives". Archived from the original on 27 April 2013.
  30. ^ Caldwell, Robert (1998). A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Or South-Indian Family of Languages. Asian Educational Services. pp. 6, 16, 17–19, 20, 21–25. ISBN 978-81-206-0117-8. Malayalam is spoken along the Malabar coast, on the western side of the Ghauts, or Malaya range of mountains, from the vicinity of Kumbla near Mangalore, where it supersedes Tuļu, to Kanyakumari, where it begins to be superseded by Tamil. (Pages 6, 16, 20, 31)

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