Malayalam

Malayalam is a Dravidian language, primarily spoken by the Malayali people, native to the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry. It is one of 22 scheduled languages, as well as one of 11 classical languages, of India. Malayalam has official language status in Kerala, Lakshadweep and Puducherry.
Malayalam is spoken by significant numbers of people in India and is the majority language in the state of Kerala. Malayalam is also spoken by linguistic minorities in the neighbouring states; with a significant number of speakers in the Kodagu and Dakshina Kannada districts of Karnataka, and Kanyakumari, Coimbatore and Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu. It is also spoken by the Malayali Diaspora worldwide, especially in the Persian Gulf countries, due to the large populations of Malayali expatriates there. They are a significant population in each city in India including Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad etc.
The origin of Malayalam remains a matter of dispute among scholars. The mainstream view holds that Malayalam descends from a western coastal dialect of early Middle Tamil and separated from it sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries, although this medieval western dialect also preserved some archaisms suggesting an earlier divergence of the spoken dialects in the prehistoric period. A second view argues for the development of the two languages out of "Proto-Dravidian" or "Proto-Tamil-Malayalam" either in the prehistoric period or in the middle of the first millennium A.D., although this is generally rejected by historical linguists. The Quilon Syrian copper plates of 849/850 CE are considered by some to be the oldest available inscription written in Old Malayalam. However, the existence of Old Malayalam is sometimes disputed by scholars. They regard the Chera Perumal inscriptional language as a diverging dialect or variety of contemporary Tamil. The oldest extant literary work in Malayalam distinct from the Tamil tradition is Ramacharitam.
The earliest script used to write Malayalam was the Vatteluttu script. The current Malayalam script is based on the Vatteluttu script, which was extended with Grantha script letters to adopt Indo-Aryan loanwords. It bears high similarity with the Tigalari script, a historical script that was used to write the Tulu language in South Canara, and Sanskrit in the adjacent Malabar region. The modern Malayalam grammar is based on the book Kerala Panineeyam written by A. R. Raja Raja Varma in late 19th century CE. The first travelogue in any Indian language is the Malayalam Varthamanappusthakam, written by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar in 1785.
Robert Caldwell describes the extent of Malayalam in the 19th century as extending from the vicinity of Kumbla in the north where it supersedes with Tulu to Kanyakumari in the south, where it begins to be superseded by Tamil, beside the inhabited islands of Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea.

Etymology

In a 7th-century poem written by the Tamil poet Sambandar the people of Kerala are referred to as malaiyāḷar. The word is also said to originate from the words, meaning 'mountain', and, meaning 'region' or '-ship' ; thus translates directly as 'the mountain region'. The term Malabar was used as an alternative term for Malayalam in foreign trade circles to denote the southwestern coast of the Indian peninsula, which also means The land of hills. The term originally referred to the western hilly land of the Chera dynasty, Kingdom of Ezhimala, and Ay kingdom, and only later became the name of its language. The language Malayalam was alternatively called,,,,,,, and until the early 19th century CE.
The earliest extant literary works in the regional language of present-day Kerala probably date back to as early as the 12th century. At that time, the language was differentiated by the name Kerala Bhasha. The earliest mention of Malayalam as a language is found outside of Kerala in the 15th century Telugu work Śrībhīmēśvarapurāṇamu by Śrīnātha. The distinctive "Malayalam" named identity of this language appears to have come into existence in Kerala only around the 16th century, when it was known as "Malayayma" or "Malayanma"; the words were also used to refer to the script and the region. According to Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese visitor who visited Kerala in the early 16th century CE, the people in the southwestern Malabar coast of India from Kumbla in north to Kanyakumari in south had a unique language, which was called "Maliama" by them.
Prior to this period, the people of Kerala usually referred to their language as "Tamil", and both terms overlapped into the colonial period.

History

Due to the geographical isolation of the Malabar Coast from the rest of the Indian peninsula due to the presence of the Western Ghats mountain ranges which lie parallel to the coast, the dialect of Old Tamil spoken in Kerala was different from that spoken in Tamil Nadu. The mainstream view holds that Malayalam began to grow as a distinct literary language from the western coastal dialect of Middle Tamil and the linguistic separation completed sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries. The renowned poets of Classical Tamil such as Paranar, Ilango Adigal, and Kulasekhara Alvar were Keralites. The Sangam works can be considered as the ancient predecessor of Malayalam.
According to Govindankutty, both Tamil and Malayalam developed during the prehistoric period from a common ancestor, "Proto-Tamil-Malayalam", and that the notion of Malayalam being a "daughter" of Tamil is misplaced. This is based on the fact that Malayalam and several Dravidian languages on the Western Coast have common archaic features which are not found even in the oldest historical forms of literary Tamil. Despite this, Malayalam shares many common innovations with Tamil that emerged during the early Middle Tamil period, thus making independent descent untenable.
Indeed, most features of Malayalam morphology are derivable from a form of speech corresponding to early Middle Tamil.
Robert Caldwell, in his 1856 book "A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages", opined that literary Malayalam branched from Classical Tamil and over time gained a large amount of Sanskrit vocabulary and lost the personal terminations of verbs. As the language of scholarship and administration, Old-Tamil, which was written in Tamil-Brahmi and the Vatteluttu alphabet later, greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam as a literary language. The Malayalam script began to diverge from the Vatteluttu and the Western Grantha scripts in the 8th and 9th centuries of Common Era. By the end of the 13th century, a written form of the language emerged which was unique from the Vatteluttu script that was used to write Tamil on the eastern coast.

Old Malayalam

, an inscriptional language found in Kerala from the 9th to the 13th century CE, is the earliest attested form of Malayalam. The development of Old Malayalam from a western coastal dialect of Middle Tamil began around the 8th century CE. It remained a west coast dialect until circa 9th century CE or a little later. The origin of Malayalam calendar dates back to year 825 CE. It is generally agreed that the western coastal dialect of Tamil began to separate, diverge, and grow as a distinct language due to geographical separation of Kerala from the Tamil country and the influence of Sanskrit and Prakrit from the Nambudiri Brahmins of the Malabar Coast.
The Old Malayalam language was employed in several official records and transactions. Most of the inscriptions in Old Malayalam were found from the northern districts of Kerala, which lie adjacent to Tulu Nadu. Old Malayalam was mostly written in Vatteluttu script. Old Malayalam had several features distinct from the contemporary Tamil, including the nasalisation of adjoining sounds, substitution of palatal sounds for dental sounds, contraction of vowels, and the rejection of gender verbs. Ramacharitam and Thirunizhalmala are the possible literary works of Old Malayalam found so far.

Middle Malayalam

gradually developed into Middle Malayalam by the 13th century CE. Malayalam literature also completely diverged from Tamil literature during this period. Works including Unniyachi Charitham, Unnichiruthevi Charitham, and Unniyadi Charitham, are written in Middle Malayalam, and date back to the 13th and 14th centuries of the Common Era. The Sandesha Kavyas of 14th century CE written in Manipravalam language include Unnuneeli Sandesam. Kannassa Ramayanam and Kannassa Bharatham by Rama Panikkar of the Niranam poets who lived between 1350 and 1450, are representative of this language. Ulloor has opined that Rama Panikkar holds the same position in Malayalam literature that Edmund Spenser does in English literature. The Champu Kavyas written by Punam Nambudiri, one among the Pathinettara Kavikal in the court of the Zamorin of Calicut, also belong to Middle Malayalam. The literary works of this period were heavily influenced by Manipravalam, which was a combination of contemporary Tamil and Sanskrit. The word Mani-Pravalam literally means Diamond-Coral or Ruby-Coral. The 14th-century Lilatilakam text states Manipravalam to be a Bhashya where "Dravida and Sanskrit should combine together like ruby and coral, without the least trace of any discord". The scripts of Kolezhuthu and Malayanma were also used to write Middle Malayalam. In addition to Vatteluthu and Grantha script, those were used to write Old Malayalam. The literary works written in Middle Malayalam were heavily influenced by Sanskrit and Prakrit, while comparing them with the modern Malayalam literature.
File:Copy of Ezhuthachan's Adhyathma ramayanam Kilippattu.jpg|thumb|Copy of Ezhuthachan's stylus and Adhyatma Ramayanam preserved at Thunchan Parambu, Tirur|251x251px