IntroductionMalayalam is the principal language in the South Indian state of Kerala. It is one of the 23 official languages of India, spoken by around 37 million people. Malayalam has a strong literary history, which is centuries old. The earliest literary composition in the language is from the 13th century. Like other major Dravidian languages, Malayalam has a number of regional dialects, social dialects that reflect differences in caste and religion, and marked distinctions in formal and informal usage. The word /Malayalam/ originally meant mountainous country (/mala/- mountain + /aLam/-place). Malayalam is probably the only language whose name, when spelled in English, is a palindrome.
History, Literature and Script
Malayalam is one of the four major languages of the Dravidian Language Family, which includes Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. 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. In his Comparative Grammar of Dravidian Languages (1875), Bishop Robert Caldwell argued that Malayalam evolved out of Tamil and that the process took place during the Sangam period (first five centuries A.D.) when Kerala belonged to the larger political unit called Tamilakam, the apogee of Dravidian civilization. After the waning of the Sangam Age, the Kerala region went through a prolonged "Dark Ages" (500-900 C.E.) when Sanksritization (influx of Aryan culture from the North) of the dialect was completed, which helped the emergence of Manipravalam (a mixture of the local dialect and Sanskrit), which in turn helped the formation of Malayalam as an independent language. Several poetic works written in this mixed-style have survived; highly erotic and decadent in nature, they express the world view of the feudal class that monopolized the Kerala culture until the first decade of the twentieth century.
Until around 18th century, malayalam used vattezhuthu as the script. Then two forms of scripts derived from vattezhuthu - kolezhuthu, which was used in Cochin and Malabar and malayanma, which was used in Travancore. Malayalam now consists of 53 letters including 16 long and short vowels and the rest consonants, in addition to the many conjugated and miscellaneous letters. The conjugated letters are combinations of two consonants, but they are written distinctly. There are about 90,100 words in the Malayalam dictionary
Sabdhatharavali. As a result of the difficulties of printing Malayalam, a simplified or reformed version of the script was introduced during the 1970s and 1980s. 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. The main change involved writing consonants and diacritics separately rather than as complex characters. These changes are not applied consistently applied so the modern script is often a mixture of traditional and simplified characters.
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 first Malayalam prose work,
{Bhashakautiliyam}, a commentary on Kautilya's Arthasastra was written in the twelfth century. The first Malayalam grammar/literary treatise,
{Lilathilakam}, compiled in the fourteenth century, is considered the culmination of Manipravalam style. While the region continued to produce important works of literature in Sanskrit and Tamil, only by the fifteenth century Malayalam had would produce its first truly classic work--this was Cherusseri's
{Krishna Gatha}-- and the sixteenth century became the age of Thunchath Ezhuthachan, the father of modern Malayalam literature, whose renderings of Adhyatma Ramayana and Mahabharata employed the narrative device of
{kilipattu}, Bird Song. Two of the important traditional grammars published in Malayalam are Gundert's {malayalabhasha vyakaranam} and Raja Raja Varma's {
keralapanainiyam}.
Malayalam is extraordinarily rich in every genre of literature. Every year numerous books and publications are produced in Malayalam. In Kerala alone 170 daily papers, 235 weekly and 560 monthly periodicals are published in Malayalam. The most circulated daily paper in India is in Malyalam.
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