Malayalam is a dravidian language spoken in the indian state of kerala and the union territories of lakshaweep and puducherry by the malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of india. Malayalam was designated a classical language of india in 2013. Malayalam has official language status in kerala, and puducherry and is also the primary spoken language of lakshadweep, and is spoken by 34 million people in india.malayalam is also spoken by linguistic minorities in the neighbouring states, with significant number of speakers in the kodagu and dakshina kannada districs of karnataka, and kanyakumari, districts of tamil nadu. It is also spoken by the malayali diaspora world wide, especially in the gulf countries, due to large populations of malayali expartiates there.there are significant population in each cities in india including mumbai, bengaluru, delhi, chennai, Ahmedabad, hyderbad, kolkata, pune etc
The word malayalam orginated from the words mala, meaning ‘mountain’mountain' and alam, meaning'region'or ship. Malayalam 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 southweatern coast of the indian peninsula, which also means the land of hills.the term orginally referred to the western hilly land of the chera dynasty, kingdom of ezhimala and ez kingdom.and only later became the name of its language. The language malayalam was alternatively called Alealum, malayalani, malayali, malabari, and kerala bhasha until the early 19th century.
Aside from the malayalam script, the malayalam language has been written in other scripts like latin, syriac and arabic. Suriyani malayalam was used by saint thomas christians until the 19th century. Arabic scripts particularly were taught in madrasahs in kerala and the lakshadweep islands.
Historically, several scripts were used to write malayalam. Among these were the vatteluttu, kolezhutu and malayanma scripts. But it was the grantha script, another southern brahmi variation, which gave rise to the modern malayalam script.the modern malyalam script bears high similarity to tigalari script, which was used for writing tulu language in coastal karnataka and the northern most kasargod district of kerala. It is syllabic in the sence that the sequance of graphic elements means that syllables have to be read as units, though in this system the elements representing individual vowels and consanants are for the most part readily identifiable. In the 1960s malayalam dispensed with many special letters representing less frequent conjunct consaonants and compinations of the vowel /u, u:/ with different consonants.
Malayalam script consists of a total of 578 characters. The script contains 52 letters including 16 vowels and 36 consonants, which forms 576 syllabic characters, and contains two addittional diacritic characters named anusvara and visarga
