Malayalam

Malayalam
മലയാളം, malayāḷaṁ
Malayalam in Malayalam script
Pronunciation[mɐlɐjaːɭɐm]; pronunciation
Native toIndia
RegionKerala with border communities in the Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu, Lakshadweep and Mahé, Puducherry
EthnicityMalayali
SpeakersL1: 37 million (2011)[1][2][3]
L2: 710,000[2]
Early forms
Dialects
Official status
Official language in
Regulated by
Language codes
ISO 639-1ml
ISO 639-2mal
ISO 639-3mal
Glottologmala1464
Linguasphere49-EBE-ba
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.
PersonMalayāḷi
PeopleMalayāḷikaḷ
LanguageMalayāḷam
CountryMalayāḷa Nāṭu
A Malayalam speaker, recorded in South Africa

Malayalam (/ˌmæləˈjɑːləm/;[6] 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.[7][8] Malayalam has official language status in Kerala, Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé),[9][10][11] and is also the primary spoken language of Lakshadweep and is spoken by 35 million people in India.[12] 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, Delhi, Kolkata, Pune etc. Malayalam is closely related to the Tamil language.

The origin of Malayalam remains a matter of dispute among scholars. The mainstream view holds that Malayalam descends from early Middle Tamil and separated from it sometime around the c. 9th century CE.[13] A second view argues for the development of the two languages out of "Proto-Dravidian" or "Proto-Tamil-Malayalam" in the prehistoric era,[14] although this is generally rejected by historical linguists.[15] It is generally agreed that the Quilon Syrian copper plates of 849/850 CE is the oldest available inscription written in Old Malayalam. The existence of Old Malayalam is sometimes disputed by scholars.[16] They regard the Chera Perumal inscriptional language as a diverging dialect or variety of contemporary Tamil.[16] The oldest extant literary work in Malayalam distinct from the Tamil tradition is Ramacharitam (late 12th or early 13th century).[17]

The earliest script used to write Malayalam was the Vatteluttu script.[18] The current Malayalam script is based on the Vatteluttu script, which was extended with Grantha script letters to adopt Indo-Aryan loanwords.[18][19] 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.[20] The modern Malayalam grammar is based on the book Kerala Panineeyam written by A. R. Raja Raja Varma in late 19th century CE.[21] The first travelogue in any Indian language is the Malayalam Varthamanappusthakam, written by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar in 1785.[22][23]

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,[24] besides the inhabited islands of Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea.

  1. ^ "Census of India Website : Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India". Archived from the original on 15 August 2018. Retrieved 26 December 2019.
  2. ^ a b Malayalam at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024) Closed access icon
  3. ^ 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
  4. ^ "Dravidian". Ethnologue. Archived from the original on 16 April 2017.
  5. ^ Official languages, UNESCO, archived from the original on 28 September 2005, retrieved 10 May 2007
  6. ^ Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh, p. 300.
  7. ^ "'Classical' status for Malayalam". The Hindu. Thiruvananthapuram, India. 24 May 2013. Archived from the original on 27 September 2013. Retrieved 25 May 2013.
  8. ^ "Malayalam gets classical language status". The Indian Express. 24 May 2013. Archived from the original on 7 September 2021. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  9. ^ "Official Language (Legislative) Commission". Archived from the original on 25 March 2015. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  10. ^ "P&ARD Official Languages". Archived from the original on 1 April 2015. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  11. ^ "Languages in Lakshadweep". Archived from the original on 11 April 2015. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  12. ^ "Malayalam". Ethnologue. Retrieved 3 March 2024.
  13. ^ Ayyar, Ramaswami (1936). The Evolution of Malayalam Morphology (1st ed.). Cochin, Kerala: Cochin government press. pp. 1–37.
  14. ^ Asher & Kumari 1997, p. xxiv.
  15. ^ 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)".
  16. ^ 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 9780520228214.
  17. ^ "Malayalam literature | Facts, Writers, Poetry, & Examples". Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on 21 March 2023. Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  18. ^ a b 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.
  19. ^ 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.
  20. ^ Cite error: The named reference Tulu Unicode 2017 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  21. ^ Mathrubhumi Yearbook Plus – 2019 (Malayalam ed.). Kozhikode: P. V. Chandran, Managing Editor, Mathrubhumi Printing & Publishing Company Limited, Kozhikode. 2018. p. 454. ASIN 8182676444.
  22. ^ Menon, A. Sreedhara (2008). The legacy of Kerala (1st DCB ed.). Kottayam, Kerala: D C Books. ISBN 978-81-264-2157-2.
  23. ^ "August 23, 2010 Archives". Archived from the original on 27 April 2013.
  24. ^ 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)