Malayalam language
Malayalam is the language spoken predominantly in the
state of
Kerala, in
southern India. It is one of the 23 official languages of India, spoken by around 36 million people. A native speaker of Malayalam is called a "Malayali". Malayalam is also spoken in the Union territories of
Lakshadweep and
Pondicherry .
The language 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.
Encyclopedia
Malayalam is the language spoken predominantly in the
state of
Kerala, in
southern India. It is one of the 23 official languages of India, spoken by around 36 million people. A native speaker of Malayalam is called a "Malayali". Malayalam is also spoken in the Union territories of
Lakshadweep and
Pondicherry .
The language 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.
Evolution
With
Tamil,
Toda, Kota, Kodava Thakk and
Kannada, Malayalam belongs to the southern group of Dravidian languages. Its roots are in Sanskrit. Its affinity to Tamil is most striking. Proto-Tamil Malayalam, the common stock of Tamil and Malayalam apparently diverged 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 and Mahe/Mayyazhi are the only places in the world where Malayalam is the main spoken language.
Development of literature
The earliest written record of Malayalam is the Vazhappalli inscription . 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 on Chanakya's Arthasastra. Adhyathmaramayanam by Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan is 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. Modern literature is rich in poetry, fiction, drama, biography, and literary criticism.
Phonology
For the consonants and vowels, the IPA is given, followed by the Malayalam character and the ISO 15919 transliteration.
Vowels
| | Short | Long |
|---|
| Front | Central | Back | Front | Central | Back |
|---|
| Close | ? i | * u | ? u | ? i | | ? u |
|---|
| Mid | ? e | * a | ? o | ? e | | ? o |
|---|
| Open | | ? a | | | ? a | |
|---|
- * is the , an epenthentic vowel in Malayalam. Therefore, it has no independent vowel letter but, when it comes after a consonant, there are various ways of representing it. In mediaeval times, it was just represented with the symbol for , but later on it was just completely missed out . In modern times, it is written in two different ways - the Northern style, in which a chandrakkala is used, and the Southern or Travancore style, in which the diacritic for a is attached to the preceding consonant and a chandrakkala is written above.
- * and are both represented as basic or "default" vowels in the abugida script , but they are distinct vowels.
Malayalam has also borrowed the Sanskrit diphthongs of and , although these mostly occur only in Sanskrit loanwords. Traditionally , four vocalic consonants have been classified as vowels: vocalic r , long vocalic r , vocalic l and long vocalic l .
Consonants
- The unaspirated alveolar plosive used to have a separate character but it has become obsolete because it only occurs in geminate form or immediately following other consonants . To see how the archaic letter looked, find the Malayalam letter in the the row for t .
- The alveolar nasal used to have a separate character but this is now obsolete and the sound is now almost always represented by the symbol that was originally used only for the dental nasal.
- The letter ? represents both , a native phoneme, and , which only occurs in borrowed words.
is an allophone of occurring in certain words. However, there are no rules to determine where occurs and where occurs - it must simply be memorized.
The script
In the early ninth century /vattezhuthu/ 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 very prominent in Malayalam 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.
Borrowing words from Sanskrit
When words are borrowed from Sanskrit, they are usually changed to conform to Malayalam norms:
- Masculine Sanskrit words ending in a short "a" in the nominative singular change their ending to "an". For example, -> . However, there are exceptions - for example, if someone's first name were a Sanskrit derived name like , a person talking about him might drop the "n" if it were immediately followed by his surname .
- Feminine words ending in a long "a" or "i" are changed so that they now end in a short "a" or "i", for example Sita -> Sita and -> . However, the long vowel still appears in compound words like Sitadevi or . Some vocative case forms of both Sanskrit and native Malayalam words end in a or i, and there are also a small number of nominative i endings that have not been shortened - a prominent example being the word Sri,
- Masculine words ending in a long "a" in the nominative singular have a "vu" added to them, for example Brahma -> Brahmavu.
- Words which end in "n" in the Sanskrit nominative singular but have a different root - for example, the Sanskrit root of "Bhagavan" is actually "Bhagavat"- are also changed. The original root is ignored and "Bhagavan" is taken as the basic form of the noun when declining.
- Sanskrit words describing things or animals rather than people which end in a short "a" have an "m" added to the end in Malayalam. For example, -> . "Things and animals" and "people" are not differentiated based on whether or not they are sentient beings - for example Narasimha becomes Narasimham and not Narasimhan whilst Ananta becomes Anantan even though both are sentient - but on purely arbitrary criteria.
- A very few people whose Sanskrit names end in "a" are given the plural suffix "-r" rather than normal "n" because they are revered, but this is extremely inconsistent - for example, becomes but Agastya becomes Agastyan.
- All other nouns like "", "Prajapati" etc stay the same.
Trivia
- Malayalam is the longest language name in English which is a palindrome.
- The first Malayalam dictionary was compiled by a German missionary, Hermann Gundert .
- The first work published in Europe on Malayalam is Alphabetum grandonico-malabaricum sive samscrudonicum, published in 1772. The types were prepared by Clemente Peani.
- First Malayalam short story was written by Vengayil Kunhiraman Nayanar called Vasanavikriti
See also
- The lists of and at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
- Judeo-Malayalam
- Kerala
- Beary bashe
- Malayalam calendar
- Malayalam literature
- Malayalam cinema
- Malayalam journalism
- List of places in Kerala
- Demographics of India for a list of the official languages of India.
- Languages of India
- List of national languages of India
- List of Indian languages by total speakers
External links
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- A means to transliterate romanised to Unicode Malayalam
- for Windows, Linux and Mac.
- Download Editor and Malayalam font
