ABSTRACT
Kerala became an Indian state shortly after Indian independence in 1947; its boundaries were drawn on linguistic lines. Kerala was specifically defined as the state whose native language is Malayalam, one of the seventeen official state languages of India. Although the two use different alphabets, Malayalam is closer to Tamil than to any other Indian language, for the original language of the Kerala region was an archaic form of Tamil. Malayalam only emerged as a distinct language around the tenth century (for more on Keralas history, see Sreedhara Menon 1988).
