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Malayalam

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Note: Malayalam is not the Malay language, which is spoken in Malaysia.
Malayalam
മലയാളം malayāḷaṁ
Native toIndia
RegionPredominantly in Kerala, Lakshadweep and Pondicherry
Native speakers
35.7 million
Official status
Official language in
Kerala State and the Union Territories of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry
Language codes
ISO 639-1ml
ISO 639-2mal
ISO 639-3mal

Malayalam (മലയാളം malayāḷaṁ) is the language of the state of Kerala, in southern India. It is one of the 22 official languages of India, spoken by around 30 million people. A native speaker of Malayalam is called a "Malayali" (or sometimes a "Keraleeyan" or "Keralite"). Malayalam is also spoken in the Lakshadweep Islands of India.

It belongs to the family of Dravidian languages. Both the language and its writing system are closely related to Tamil. Malayalam has a script of its own.

The word Malayalam is intersting because it is a palindrome in English.

Evolution

With Tamil, Kota, Kodava Thakk and Kannada, Malayalam belongs to the southern group of Dravidian languages. Its affinity to Tamil is the most striking. Proto-Tamil Malayalam, the common stock of Tamil and Malayalam apparently disintegrated over a period of four of five centuries from the ninth century on, resulting in the emergence of Malayalam as a language distinct from Tamil. As the language of scholarship and administration Tamil greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam. Later the irresistible inroads the Namboothiris made into the cultural life of Kerala and the trade relationships with Arabs and the conquest of Kerala by 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 and Hindus.

Kerala and Lakshadweep Islands are the only places in the world where Malayalam is the main spoken language.

Malayalam colloquial grammar is available at [1]

Development of literature

The earliest written record of Malayalam is the Vazhappalli inscription (ca. 830 AD). The early literature of Malayalam comprised three types of composition:

  • Classical songs known as /Pattu/ of the Tamil tradition
  • Manipravalam/ of the Sanskrit tradition, which permitted a generous interspersing of Sanskrit with Malayalam
  • The folk song rich in native elements

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. 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. Modern literature is rich in poetry, fiction, drama, biography, and literary criticism.

The script

Main article: Malayalam script

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 now consists of 56 letters including 20 long and short vowels and the rest consonants. 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 less 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.

Language variation and external influence

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 most prominent in the Hindu high caste dialects and least in the lower caste dialects like most other Indian languages. Loan words from English, Syriac, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Portuguese abound in the Christian dialects and those from Arabic and Urdu in the Muslim dialects. Malayalam has borrowed from Sanskrit thousands of nouns, hundreds of verbs and some indeclinables. Some items of basic vocabulary also have found their way into Malayalam from Sanskrit. Like in other parts of India, Sanskrit was considered an aristocratic and scholastic language, similar to Latin in European history.

But a greater degree of Sanskrit influence is confined to the Namboothiri dialect of Malayalam which is spoken by people constituting less than 2% of the total Malayali population. At the same time Portuguese and Arabic influence is limited to loan words but outnumbers those from Sanskrit.

Trivia

  • Malayalam is the longest language name in English which is a palindrome (it is spelled the same both backwards and forwards).
  • The first Malayalam dictionary was compiled by a German missionary, Hermann Gundert (Grandfather of Nobel Laureate German writer Hermann Hesse).
  • The language consists of a complex phonetic system that makes it difficult for outsiders to understand. For this reason it was used for wireless communications in the disputed Indian-Pakistani border.

See also

Malayalam edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Malayalam&oldid=45835713"