ABSTRACT
This South Dravidian language is spoken by at least 35 million people in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, and is one of the officially recognized state languages of India. It is also spoken by communities in, among other localities, Singapore, Malaysia and the Gulf. Malayalam is a close relative of Tamil, from which it seems to have diverged in comparatively recent times, perhaps during the thirteenth century ad. There are two main points of difference between Tamil and Malayalam: the personal endings of the verb, present in Tamil, have been lost in Malayalam; and, second, the extent of borrowing from Sanskrit is considerably greater in Malayalam. From the nineteenth century onwards, there has been a gradual tendency for the colloquial language to replace the heavily Sanskritized literary style.
