Malayalam is the main language of the state of Kerala, in southern India.
It is also one of the 22 official languages of India, spoken by around 30 million people.
A person who speaks Malayalam is called a "Malayalee".
It belongs to the family of Dravidian languages.
Both the language and its writing system are closely related to Tamil, although Malayalam has a significantly larger phoneme inventory.
Malayalam has a script of its own. 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
Notable features:
This is a syllabic alphabet in which all consonants have an inherent vowel. Diacritics, which can appear above, below, before or after the consonant they belong to, are used to change the inherent vowel.
When they appear the the beginning of a syllable, vowels are written as independent letters.
When certain consonants occur together, special conjunct symbols are used which combine the essential parts of each letter.
Malayalam is spoken in Kerala, Laccadive Islands, and neighboring states. Also spoken in Bahrain, Fiji, Israel, Malaysia, Qatar, Singapore, UAE, United Kingdom. 35,351,000 in India and 35,706,000 or more total in all countries speak malayalam. Three Letter Code for this language is MJS and aternative names are ALEALUM, MALAYALANI, MALAYALI, MALEAN, MALIYAD, MALLEALLE, MOPLA. Dialects of malayalam include MALABAR, NAGARI-MALAYALAM, MALAYALAM, SOUTH KERALA, CENTRAL KERALA, NORTH KERALA, KAYAVAR, NAMBOODIRI, MOPLAH, PULAYA, NASRANI, NAYAR.
