Malayalam script (; / ) is a Brahmic abugida used to write Malayalam, the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 45 million people. Malayalam is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of the official scripts of India.
The Malayalam script is the sister script of the Tigalari script, used to write the Tulu language, spoken in coastal Karnataka (Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts) and the northernmost Kasargod district of Kerala. Like many Indic scripts, it is an alphasyllabary (abugida), a writing system that is partially "alphabetic" and partially syllable-based. The modern Malayalam alphabet has 15 vowel letters, 42 consonant letters, and a few other symbols. The Malayalam script is a Vatteluttu alphabet extended with symbols from the Grantha alphabet to represent Indo-Aryan loanwords. The script is also used to write several minority languages such as Paniya, Betta Kurumba, and Ravula.Ethnologue (16th ed.): "Paniya", "Kurumba, Betta", and "Ravula". The Malayalam language itself has been historically written in several different scripts.
History Malayalam was first written in Vattezhuthu script, an ancient script of Tamil and Malayalam languages. Modern Malayalam script evolved from the Grantha alphabet, and Vattezhuthu, both of which evolved independently from Tamil-Brahmi script.
Vatteluttu () is a script that had evolved from Tamil-Brahmi and was once used extensively in the southern part of present-day Tamil Nadu and in Kerala. The Vazhappally inscription issued by Rajashekhara Varman is the earliest example, dating from about 830 CE. During the medieval period, the Tigalari script that was used for writing Tulu in South Canara, and Sanskrit in the adjacent Malabar region, was very similar to the modern Malayalam script. In the Tamil state, the modern Tamil script had supplanted Vattezhuthu by the 15th century, but in the Malabar region, Vattezhuthu remained in general use up to the 17th century,Burnell (1874), p. 39. or the 18th century. A variant form of this script, Kolezhuthu, was used until about the 19th century mainly in the Malabar-Cochin area. Another variant form, Malayanma, was used in the south of Thiruvananthapuram.
According to Arthur Coke Burnell, one form of the Grantha alphabet, originally used in the Chola dynasty, was imported into the southwest coast of India in the 8th or 9th century, and then modified in course of time in this secluded area, where communication with the east coast was very limited.Burnell (1874), p. 35. It later evolved into Tigalari-Malayalam script was used by the Malayali, Havyaka Brahmins and Tulu Brahmin people, but was originally only used to write Sanskrit. This script split into two scripts: Tigalari and Malayalam. While Malayalam script was extended and modified to write vernacular language Malayalam, the Tigalari was written for Sanskrit only. In Malabar, this writing system was termed Arya-eluttu (, Ārya eḻuttŭ), meaning "Arya writing" (Sanskrit is Indo-Aryan language while Malayalam is a Dravidian language).
Vatteluttu was in general use, but was not suitable for literature where many Sanskrit words were used. Like Tamil-Brahmi, it was originally used to write Tamil, and as such, did not have letters for voiced or aspirated consonants used in Sanskrit but not used in Tamil. For this reason, Vatteluttu and the Grantha alphabet were sometimes mixed, as in the Manipravalam. One of the oldest examples of the Manipravalam literature, Vaishikatantram (, Vaiśikatantram), dates back to the 12th century,Nampoothiri, N. M. (1999), "Cultural Traditions in Medieval Kerala" (PDF) in Cherian, P. J., Perspectives on Kerala History: The Second Millennium, Kerala Council for Historical Research, , retrieved 2009-11-20. where the earliest form of the Malayalam script was used, which seems to have been systematised to some extent by the first half of the 13th century.
Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan is credited with developing Malayalam script into its current form through the intermixing and modification of Vatteluttu, Kolezhuthu, and Grantha script, which were used to write the inscriptions and literary works of Old and Middle Malayalam. He further eliminated excess and unnecessary letters from the modified script. Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan, a poet from around the 16th century, used Arya-eluttu to write his Malayalam poems based on Classical Sanskrit literature. For a few letters missing in Arya-eluttu (ḷa, ḻa, ṟa), he used Vatteluttu. The popularity of his works caused the Malayali people to call him the father of the Malayalam language, which also popularised Arya-eluttu as a script to write Malayalam. Grantha did not have distinctions between e and ē, and between o and ō, as it was as an alphabet to write a Sanskrit language. The Malayalam script as it is today was modified in the middle of the 19th century when Hermann Gundert invented the new vowel signs to distinguish them.
By the 19th century, old scripts like Kolezhuthu had been supplanted by Arya-eluttu – that is the current Malayalam script. It is now widely used in the Malayali press in Kerala.Andronov, Mikhail Sergeevich. A Grammar of the Malayalam Language in Historical Treatment. Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz, 1996.
Orthography reform In 1961, the Government of Kerala reformed the orthography of Malayalam by a government order to the education department. The objective was to simplify the script for print and typewriting technology of that time, by reducing the number of glyphs required. In 1967, the government appointed a committee headed by Sooranad Kunjan Pillai, who was the editor of the Malayalam Lexicon project. It reduced the number of glyphs required for Malayalam printing from around 1000 to around 250. Above committee's recommendations were further modified by another committee in 1969.
This proposal was later accepted by major newspapers in January 1971. The reformed script came into effect on 15 April 1971 (the Kerala New Year), by a government order released on 23 March 1971.
Recommendations by the committees
1. Use non-ligating vowel signs for u, ū, and r̥ In the traditional orthography that had been taught in the primary education system before the reforms, any consonant or consonant ligature followed by the vowel sign u, ū, or r̥ were represented by a cursive consonant-vowel ligature. The glyph of each consonant had its own way of ligating with these vowel signs. This irregularity was simplified in the reformed script.Manohar, Kavya & Thottingal, Santhosh. (2018). "Malayalam Orthographic Reforms: Impact on Language and Popular Culture". Presented at the Graphematik 2018. Thus, a vowel sign or consonant sign would always have a disconnected symbol that did not fuse with the base consonant.
Examples: ku → kū → kr̥ → nu → śu →
2. Split uncommon conjuncts with Chandrakkala Also, most of traditional consonant-consonant ligatures, especially the less common ones only used to write words of Sanskrit origin, were split into non-ligated forms with explicit chandrakkala. For example: g + da → gda l + ta → lta ś + na → śna ś + ma → śma
The ligature () śma is required as an additional letter. For examples, , śmaśanam, is the word for cemetery.
3. Use non-ligating sign for conjoining ra Any consonant or consonant ligature followed by the conjoining ra is represented by a cursive tail attached to the consonant or the consonant-ligature. In the reformed script, this consonant sign would be disconnected from the base and represented as a left-bracket like symbol placed on the left side of the cluster. kra → kru →
Current status Today the reformed orthography, is commonly called put̪iya lipi () and traditional system, pazhaya lipi (). Current print media almost entirely uses reformed orthography. The state-run primary education introduces the Malayalam writing to the pupils in reformed script only and the books are printed accordingly. However, the digital media uses both traditional and reformed in almost equal proportions as the fonts for both the orthographies are commonly available.
Letters
The basic characters can be classified as follows: Vowels (, svaram) Independent vowel letters Dependent vowel signs (,svarachinnam) Consonant letters (, vyañjanam)
An independent vowel letter is used as the first letter of a word that begins with a vowel. A consonant letter, despite its name, does not represent a pure consonant, but represents a consonant + a short vowel /a/ by default. For example, is the first consonant letter of the Malayalam alphabet, which represents /ka/, not a simple /k/. A vowel sign is a diacritic attached to a consonant letter to indicate that the consonant is followed by a vowel other than /a/. If the following vowel is /a/, no vowel sign is needed. The phoneme /a/ that follows a consonant by default is called an inherent vowel. In Malayalam, its phonetic value is unrounded ,Canepari (2005), pp. 396, 140. or as an allophone. To denote a pure consonant sound not followed by a vowel, a special diacritic virama is used to cancel the inherent vowel. The following are examples where a consonant letter is used with or without a diacritic. /k/ = /k/ which is a consonant sound ka = /k/ + vowel sign a ki = /k/ + vowel sign i ku = /k/ + vowel sign u kai = /k/ + vowel sign ai
Malayalam alphabet is unicase, or does not have a case distinction. It is written from left to right, but certain vowel signs are attached to the left (the opposite direction) of a consonant letter that it logically follows. In the word (Kēraḷam), the vowel sign (ē) visually appears in the leftmost position, though the vowel ē logically follows the consonant k.
Vowel letters and signs The following tables show the independent vowel letters and the corresponding dependent vowel signs (diacritics) of the Malayalam script, with romanizations in ISO 15919, transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). +Monophthongs ShortLongIndependentDependentIndep.DependentVowel signExampleVowel signExamplea a(none) pa ā pāi i pi ī pīu u pu ū pūr̥ r̥ pr̥ r̥̄ pr̥̄l̥ l̥ pl̥ l̥̄ pl̥̄e e pe ē pēo o po ōോ pō
r̥, r̥̄, l̥, l̥̄, used to write Sanskrit words, are treated as vowels. They are called semi-vowels and are phonetically closer to vowels in Malayalam and in Classical Sanskrit where Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian, groups them with vowel sounds in his sutras. (see Proto-Indo-European language and Vedic Sanskrit). The letters and signs for r̥̄, l̥, l̥̄ are very rare, and are not considered as part of the modern orthography. See also the May 2001 version (PDF).
The vowel signs ā, i, ī are placed to the right of a consonant letter to which it is attached. The vowel signs e, ē, ai are placed to the left of a consonant letter. The vowel signs o and ō consist of two parts: the first part goes to the left of a consonant letter and the second part goes to the right of it. In the reformed orthography, the vowel signs u, ū, r̥ are simply placed to the right of the consonant letter, while they often make consonant-vowel ligatures in the traditional orthography. +Diphthongs IndependentDependentVowel signExampleai ai paiau au(archaic) pau(modern) pau The vowel duration as it can be used to differentiate words that would otherwise be the same. For example, means "earthenware pot" while means "time" or "season".Asher, R. E. Malayalam. Ed. T. C. Kumari 1934-. London; New York : Routledge, 1997.
Anusvaram +AnusvaramExample with അSignExample with consonantaṁ aṁ m̐ paṁ