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Malayalam language

Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAL : Malayalam language

Note: Malayalam is not the Malay language, which is spoken in Malaysia.

'Malayalam (മലയാളം malayāḷaṁ) is the language spoken predominantly in the state of Kerala, in southern India. It is one of the 22 official languages of India, spoken by around 36 million people. A native speaker of Malayalam is called a "Malayalee" (or sometimes a "Keraleeyan" or "Keralite"). Malayalam is also spoken in 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.

Contents

Evolution

With Tamil, Toda, Kota, Kodava Thakk 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 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 and Nambiars 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 are the only places in the world where Malayalam is the main spoken language.

Malayalam colloquial grammar is available at [link]

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: 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 Malyalam 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#redirect . 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/ ഇ i /ɨ˘/ * 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   /ä/ അ a     /äː/ ആ ā  

Malayalam has also borrowed the Sanskrit diphthongs of /äu/ (represented in Malayalam as ഔ, au) and /äi/ (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, /rɨ˘/,r̥) , long vocalic r (ൠ, , r̥̄ ), vocalic l (ഌ, ), l̥) and long vocalic l (ൡ, ), l̥̄)

Consonants

Bilabial Labiodental Dental Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal
Stop Unaspirated t
Aspirated
Nasal /m/ മ m /n/̪ ന n /n/ ന * n /ɳ/ ണ ṇ /ɲ/ ഞ ñ /ŋ/ ങ ṅ
Approximant /ʋ/ വ v /ɻ/ ഴ l /j/ യ y
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 the row for t [here].
* 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.
* The letter ഫ represents both /pʰ/, a native phoneme, and /f/, which only occurs in borrowed words.

The script

Basic Grantha script
Enlarge
Basic Grantha 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 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

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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 most prominent in the Hindu high caste dialects and least in the lower caste dialects 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.

But a greater degree of Sanskrit influence is confined to the Namboothiri dialect of Malayalam which is spoken by people constituting less than 2% of the total Malayali population.

Borrowing words from Sanskrit

When words are borrowed from Sanskrit, they are usually changed to conform to Malayalam norms:
  1. Masculine Sanskrit words ending in a short "a" in the nominative singular change their ending to "an". For example, Kṛṣṇa -> Kṛṣṇan. 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).
  2. 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,
  3. Masculine words ending in a long "ā" in the nominative singular have a "vŭ" added to them, for example Brahmā -> Brahmāvŭ.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. All other nouns like "Viṣṇu", "Prajāpati" etc stay the same.

Trivia

See also

External links

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