Malayalam language

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Note: Malayalam should not be confused with Malay, a language spoken in Southeast Asia.

Malayalam
മലയാളം malayāḷaṁ

Spoken in: India

Region: Predominantly in Kerala, Lakshadweep, Mahé (Mayyazhii) in Puducherry, Kodagu (Coorg) district & Gundlupet region of Mysore district of Karnataka state & Nilgiri, Coimbatore, Pollachi, Tirunelveli & Kanyakumari districts of Tamil Nadu state

Total speakers: 37 million native, 10 million second language = 47 million

Ranking: 29

Language family: Dravidian
Southern
Tamil-Kannada
Tamil-Kodagu
Tamil-Malayalam
Malayalam

Writing system: Vatteluttu

Official status

Official language of: Kerala State and the Union Territories of Lakshadweep& Puducherry ,

Regulated by: no official regulation

Language codes

ISO 639-1: ml

ISO 639-2: mal

ISO 639-3: mal

This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More...

Malayalam (മലയാളം malayāḷaṁ) 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 37 million people. A native speaker of Malayalam is called a 'Malayali'. Malayalam is also spoken in Lakshadweep, Mahé (Mayyazhi), Kodagu (Coorg) and areas of Tamil Nadu bordering Kerala.

The language belongs to the family of Dravidian languages. The language is closely related to Tamil. However, Malayalam has a script of its own, covering all alphabets of Sanskrit as well as special Dravidian letters.

1 Evolution
2 Development of literature
3 Phonology
- 3.1 Vowels
- 3.2 Consonants
4 Selected Vocabulary
5 The script
6 Dialects and external influences
- 6.1 Loan words from Sanskrit
7 Trivia
8 References
9 See also
10 External links

[edit] Evolution

Malayalam - Gods own Language

With Tamil, Toda, Kota and Kannada, Malayalam belongs to the southern group of Dravidian languages. Its affinity to Tamil is most striking. Proto-Tamil Malayalam, the common stock of Tamil and Malayalam apparently diverged over a period of four or 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, the trade relationships with Arabs, and the invasion of Kerala by the 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, Jews and Hindus.

[edit] 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. 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. Although this may be true, Malayalam is strikingly similar to Tamil, akin to the similarity between modern Dutch and German. Modern literature is rich in poetry, fiction, drama, biography, and literary criticism.

[edit] Phonology

For the consonants and vowels, the IPA is given, followed by the Malayalam character and the ISO 15919 transliteration.

[edit] Vowels

	Short			Long
	Front	Central	Back	Front	Central	Back
Close	/i/ ഇ i	/ɨ̆/ * ŭ	/u/ ഉ u	/iː/ ഈ ī		/uː/ ഊ ū
Mid	/e/ എ e	/ə/ * a	/o/ ഒ o	/eː/ ഏ ē		/oː/ ഓ ō
Open		/a/ അ a			/aː/ ആ ā

*/ɨ̆/ is the samvr̥tokāram, an epenthentic vowel in Malayalam. Therefore, it has no independent vowel letter (because it never occurs at the beginning of words) but, when it comes after a consonant, there are various ways of representing it. In medieval times, it was just represented with the symbol for /u/, but later on it was just completely omitted (that is, written as an inherent vowel). 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 /u/ is attached to the preceding consonant and a chandrakkala is written above.

*/a/ (phonetically central: [ä]) and /ə/ are both represented as basic or "default" vowels in the abugida script (although /ə/ never occurs word-initially and therefore does not make use of the letter അ), but they are distinct vowels.

Malayalam has also borrowed the Sanskrit diphthongs of /äu/ (represented in Malayalam as ഔ, au) and /ai/ (represented in Malayalam as ഐ, ai), although these mostly occur only in Sanskrit loanwords. Traditionally (as in Sanskrit), four vocalic consonants (technically consonants followed by the samvr̥tokāram, which is not officially a vowel) have been classified as vowels: vocalic r (ഋ, /rɨ̆/, r̥), long vocalic r (ൠ, /rɨː/, r̥̄), vocalic l (ഌ, /lɨ̆/, l̥) and long vocalic l (ൡ, /lɨː/, l̥̄). Except for the first, the other three have been omitted from the current script used in Kerala as as there are no words in current Malayalam that use them.

[edit] Consonants

Approximant				/ʋ/ വ v				/ɻ/ ഴ l		/j/ യ y
		Bilabial		Labiodental	Dental		Alveolar	Retroflex		Palatal		Velar		Glottal
Stop	Unaspirated	/p/ പ p	/b/ ബ b		/t̪/ ത t	/d̪/ ദ d	/t/ * t	/ʈ/ ട ṭ	/ɖ/ ഡ ḍ	/ʧ/ ച c	/ʤ/ ജ j	/k/ ക k	/g/ ഗ g
Stop	Aspirated	/pʰ/ ഫ ph	/bʱ/ ഭ bh		/t̪ʰ/ ഥ th	/d̪ʱ/ ധ dh		/ʈʰ/ ഠ ṭh	/ɖʱ/ ഢ ḍh	/ʧʰ/ ഛ ch	/ʤʱ/ ഝ jh	/kʰ/ ഖ kh	/gʱ/ ഘ gh
Nasal		/m/ മ m			/n̪/ ന n		/n/ ന * n	/ɳ/ ണ ṇ		/ɲ/ ഞ ñ		/ŋ/ ങ ṅ
Liquid							/r/ റ r
Fricative				/f/ ഫ* f			/s/ സ s	/ʂ/ ഷ ṣ		/ɕ/ ശ ś				/ɦ/ ഹ h
Tap							/ɾ/ ര r
Lateral approximant							/l/ ല l	/ɭ/ ള ḷ

The unaspirated alveolar plosive used to have a separate character but it has become obsolete because it only occurs in geminate form (when geminated it is written with a റ below another റ) or immediately following other consonants (in these cases, റ or ററ is usually written in small size underneath the first consonant). To see how the archaic letter looked, find the Malayalam letter in the row for t here. In current Malayalam, this sound is used only for words borrowed from European languages (such as English, French, Portuguese or Dutch).

The alveolar nasal used to have a separate character but this is now obsolete (to see how it looked, find the Malayalam letter in the row for n here) and the sound is now almost always represented by the symbol that was originally used only for the dental nasal. However, both sounds are extensively used in current colloquial and official Malayalam.

The letter ഫ represents both /pʰ/, a native phoneme, and /f/, which only occurs in borrowed words.

[edit] Selected Vocabulary

                  I = Njaan
                you = Thaan (or) Nee
   you (respectful) = Ninghal
               they = Avar
               mine = entey
               your = thangalude (or) nindey
             theirs = avarudey
                her = avalude
                his = avantey
               name = peru
               town = nagaram
                 no = illa, alla
                yes = undu,athe, shari
                why = enthinu
              where = evide
               what = enthu
   what's your name = thangalude peru enthaanu? (or) nindey per enthanu?         
   where are you ?  = thaangal evideyaanu? (or) ni evideyaanu
    Had your lunch? = Oonu kazhichcho?
         don't want = venda
                Boy = Aankutti
               Girl = Pennkutti
                Man = Aannu
              Woman = Pennu
              River = Puzha
               Well = Kinar 
             Stream = Todü
             Bridge = Paalam
                Dog = Naaya/Patti
                Cat = Pootcha
                Cow = Pashu
               Hand = Kai
               Leg  = Kaal
              Hair  = Mudi
             Father = Achchan, appan
             Mother = Amma
      Elder Brother = Chettan or Annan (used in southern Kerala)
    Younger Brother = Aniyan
       Elder Sister = Chechi
     Younger Sister = Aniyaththi
             Friend = Kootukaaran (Male) or Kootukaari (Female)
     Brother in Law = Aliyan

[edit] 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 language script consists of 51 letters including 16 vowels and 37 consonants^[1]. 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.

[edit] Dialects and external influences

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 formal Malayalam used in literature. The Malayalam that is used in talking and older Malayalam have an extremely limited amount of Sanskrit words, and it is almost identical to Tamil. Like in other parts of India, Sanskrit was considered an aristocratic and scholastic language, similar to Latin in European history.

Loan words and influences from Hebrew, Syriac and Ladino abound in the Jewish Malayalam dialects, as well as English, Portuguese and Greek in the Christian dialects, while Arabic and Persian elements predominate in the Muslim dialects.

[edit] Loan 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, Krishna -> Krishnan. However, there are exceptions - for example, if someone's first name were a Sanskrit derived name like Kṛṣṇan, a person talking about him might drop the "n" if it were immediately followed by his surname (this only applies for certain surnames).
Feminine words ending in a long "ā" or "ī" are changed so that they now end in a short "a" or "i", for example Sītā -> Sīta and Lakṣmī -> Lakṣmi. However, the long vowel still appears in compound words like Sītādēvi or Lakṣmīdēvi. Some vocative case forms of both Sanskrit and native Malayalam words end in ā or ī, and there are also a small number of nominative ī endings that have not been shortened - a prominent example being the word Śrī,
Masculine words ending in a long "ā" in the nominative singular have a "vŭ" added to them, for example Brahmā -> Brahmāvŭ.
Words which end in "n" in the Sanskrit nominative singular but have a different root - for example, the Sanskrit root of "Bhagavān" is actually "Bhagavat"- are also changed. The original root is ignored and "Bhagavān" (for example) 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, Rāmāyaṇa -> Rāmāyaṇam. "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, Śankarācārya becomes Śankarācāryar but Agastya becomes Agastyan.
All other nouns like "Vishnu", "Prajāpati" etc stay the same.

[edit] Trivia

"Malayalam" is the longest single-word palindrome in English.
The first Malayalam dictionary was compiled by a German missionary, Hermann Gundert (Grandfather of Nobel Laureate German writer Hermann Hesse).
The first work published in Europe on Malayalam is Alphabetum grandonico-malabaricum sive samscrudonicum, published in 1772. The types were prepared by Clemente Peani^{[citation needed]}.
The first Malayalam short story was written by Vengayil Kunhiraman Nayanar and called Vasanavikriti
Malayalam has the largest number of alphabets in entire Dravidian language system.