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Malayalam
Type	Abugida
Spoken languages	Malayalam Konkani
Time period	c. 1100–present
Parent systems	Proto-Canaanite alphabet  → Phoenician alphabet   → Aramaic alphabet    → Brāhmī     → Grantha      → Malayalam
Sister systems	Sinhala Tamil
Unicode range	U+0D00–U+0D7F
ISO 15924	Mlym
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

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The Malayalam script is an abugida of the Brahmic family, used to write the Malayalam language. From the Brahmi script, the Grantha script emerged as one of the earliest Southern scripts. It further evolved into the Malayalam script. Early Malayalam was heavily influenced by Sanskrit and Tamil. Earliest records of the Malayalam writing system include inscriptions on rock and metallic plates from around 10th century CE ¹. Nowadays, written Malayalam is widely used in the press of the Malayali population in Kerala, India. ¹

During 1970-1980, a simplified script of Malayalam immerged where the diacritics were linearized so complex characters could be organized from left to right to aid the task of printing the script². Further modifications also broke up consonant clusters into more atomic characters ². Though both these modifications adds aspects of the script to make it more alphabetic, the changes were not consistent with all of the characters making it not quite alphabetic².

Malayalam is traditionally written from left to right and each character represents a syllable though modifications in modern times have incorporated alphabetic elements into the script ². The characters are classified into two categories: swarams (or vowels) and vyanjanams (or consonants).

In the Malayalam Script, there are many ways to form words. In the most straightforward case, svaram and vyanjanam character can be strung together to form words. Often, it is more complicated because svaram characters are used only when a word begins with a vowel and vyanjanam characters are used to signify a consonant and a vowel².

Stop and fricative consonants do not occur in the final position of words. Certain nasal consonants do (m, n) and can end words depending on the dialect(ɳ, l, ɭ, ɾ, and y). Consonants all can occur in the initial position of a word except for ɳ, ŋ, ɭ, and z.³

Vowels

It is important to note the vowel duration as it is can be used to differentiate words that would otherwise be the same. For example, /kalam/ means "earthernware pot" while /kaalam/ means "time" or "season". ³

Consonants

Picture showing the relation of Malayalam to Brahmi

There is no distinction of case, i.e. no uppercase and lowercase letters. Diacritics, or vowel signs, are used to associate a vowel to a consonant though with some vowels such as "u" and "ū" are irregular with certain consonants. When no diacritic is used, the vowel sound 'a' is assumed. To denote the absence of a vowel specifically, a chandrakkala ് (also called virama) is used.

Other symbols

In addition to these symbols, there are many more symbols to indicate ligatures of the various consonants with each other.

Digits

Malayalam digits are written as follows:

Unicode for Malayalam

The Unicode range for Malayalam is U+0D00–U+0D7F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.

See also

• List of alphabets
• Grantha script
• Arabi Malayalam

External links

• Website including resources for learning Malayalam script
• Unicode Code Chart for Malayalam (PDF Format)
• Malayalam Unicode fonts
• Indian Language Converter Web-based tool to transliterate from Romanised English to Unicode Malayalam
• 'moodle' in Malayalam Virtual Learning Environment

References

This article is currently or was the subject of an 2008 fall semester educational assignment. Further details are available here.