Malayalam · മലയാളം

About Malayalam

Language family

Dravidian

Where it's spoken

Kerala, India

Speakers

roughly 38 million speakers

Malayalam split off from a common ancestor shared with Tamil roughly a thousand years ago and has since absorbed heavy Sanskrit influence, giving it a distinctive vocabulary layer within the Dravidian family. Its script has one of the largest character inventories of any writing system in active use, owing to extensive conjunct letters for consonant clusters. Kerala's historically high literacy rates give Malayalam an unusually large body of modern literature and cinema relative to its speaker population.