Malayalam alphabet
| Malayalam script |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | |
| Languages |
Malayalam Sanskrit Paniya Betta Kurumba Ravula |
|
Time period
|
C. 830 – present |
|
Parent systems
|
|
|
Sister systems
|
Sinhalese alphabet Tigalari script |
| Direction | Left-to-right |
| ISO 15924 | Mlym, 347 |
|
Unicode alias
|
Malayalam |
| U+0D00–U+0D7F | |
The Malayalam script (Malayāḷalipi; IPA: [mələjɑːɭə lɪpɪ] / Malayalam: മലയാളലിപി) is a Brahmic script used commonly to write Malayalam, which is the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 35 million people in the world. Malayalam script is also widely used for writing Sanskrit texts in Kerala. Like many other 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, 36 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. The Malayalam language itself was historically written in several different scripts.
The basic characters can be classified as follows:
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, ക 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 [ɐ], or [ə] 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.
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