Malayalam Language -- Part 3

Relation with other Indian languages

The 10 official Indic scripts - Devanagari, Tamil, Gurmukhi, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Oriya, Bengali, Malayalam and Urdu - differ by varying degrees in their visual characteristics, but share some important similarities. With the exception of the Urdu script, they have evolved from a single source, the Brahmi script, first documented extensively in the edicts of Emperor Asoka of the third century BCE. They are defined as syllabic alphabets. A unit of encoding is a syllable, however the corresponding graphic units show distinctive internal structure and a constituent set of graphemes.

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. 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.

Loan words from Sanskrit:-From Sanskrit, thousands of nouns and hundreds of verbs are borrowed into Malayalam. When words are borrowed from Sanskrit, they are usually changed to conform to Malayalam norms.

Influence of English:- English stands only second to Sanskrit in its influence on Malayalam. Hundreds of individual lexical items and idiomatic expressions in modern Malayalam are of English origin. It is observed that the word structure and syntactic structure of English have influenced Malayalam. So many English words are used in the by even common Malayali people, both in writing or in speech. To write an English word, either the English script or the the equivalent Malayalam script, which makes the similar sounds will be used, which causes the distortion of the language. Frequent use of passive voice is another linguistic area that carries English influence. Use of Abbreviation is another filed of English influence. For Example: KSRTC ( Kerala State Road Transport corporation). Apart from such abbreviations using English letters, there are some Malayalam abbreviation also available in Malayalam like S.N.D.P(Shree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam). It is a fact that some English words can also be added with Malayalam suffixes. For example: the English word, bore is added with masculine gender an and pronunce as boaran!!.