Malayalam  is one of the four major Dravidian languages of southern India. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages 


of India with official language status in the state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Mahé.

 It is  spoken by 35.9 million people.Malayalam is also spoken in the Nilgiris district, Kanyakumari district and 


Coimbatore of Tamil Nadu, Dakshina Kannada, Bangalore and Kodagu districts of Karnataka.Overseas it is also 


used by a large population of Indian expatriates living around the globe in the Middle East, North America, 


Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and Europe.
Malayalam most likely originated from ancient Tamil in the 6th century, of which Modern Tamil was also derived.An 


alternative theory proposes a split in even more ancient times.In either case, Malayalam was heavily Sanskritised 


through the ages and today over eighty percent of the words of modern Malayalam are from pure Sanskrit.Before 


Malayalam came into being, Old Tamil was used in literature and courts of a region called Tamilakam, a famous 


example being Silappatikaram. While Dravidian Tamil used to be the ruling language of the Chera Dynasty Ai and 


Pandyan kingdoms.Sanskrit/Prakrit derived Buddhist Pali Language and the Jain Kalpasutra were known to 


Keralites from 500 BC. The Grantha Bhasha or Sanskrit mixed Tamil which was written in Grantha Script (Arya 


Ezhuthu) was used by Brahmins residing in Tamil areas.The Dravidian component of Malayalam-Tamil has words 


similar to ancient Sangam Literature. During the Later Chera dynasty the inscriptions included some lines from 


Grantha Bhasha in Grantha Script along with Malayalam-Tamil written in Vattezhuttu. A form of Grantha Bhasha, a 


Sanskrit mixed Tamil closely resembling the later Malayalam was used to write books by Brahmins from Tulunadu 


residing in Kerala in the second Millennium. The oldest literature works in Malayalam, distinct from the Tamil 


tradition, is dated certainly to the 11th century, perhaps to the 9th century. For cultural purposes Malayalam and 


Sanskrit formed a language known as Manipravalam, where both languages were used in an alternating style. 


Malayalam is the only among the major Dravidian languages without diglossia. This means, that the Malayalam 

which is spoken doesn't differ from the written variant, while the Kannada and Tamil languages use a classical 


type for the latter.
The word "Malayalam" is spelled as a palindrome in English. However, it is not a palindrome in its own script, for 


three reasons: the third a is long and should properly be transliterated aa or a while the other a’s are short; the two 


l consonants represent different sounds, the first l being dental   and the second retroflex  and the final m is written 


as an anusvara, which denotes the same phoneme /m/ as in the initial m in this case, but the two m’s are spelled differently 

parasuraman
maid kerala