Malayalam script
Malayalam script (; / Malayalam: മലയാളലിപി) is a Brahmic script used commonly to write Malayalam, which is the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 45 million people in the world. It is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India Malayalam script is also widely used for writing Sanskrit texts in Kerala. The Malayalam script bears high similarity with Tigalari script, which was used for writing the Tulu language, spoken in coastal Karnataka (Dakshina  Kannada and Udupi districts) and the northernmost Kasargod district of 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, 42 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. History. Malayalam was first written  in the Tamil-Brahmi script, an ancient script of Tamil and Malayalam languages. However, the modern Malayalam script evolved from the Grantha alphabet, and Vattezhuthu, both of which evolved from the Tamil-Brahmi, but independently. Vatteluttu () is a script that had evolved from Tamil-Brahmi and was once used extensively in the southern part of present-day Tamil Nadu and in Kerala. The Vazhappally inscription issued by Rajashekhara Varman is the earliest example, dating from about 830 CE. During the medieval period, the Tigalari script that was used for writing Tulu in South Canara, and Sanskrit in the adjacent Malabar  region, was very similar to the modern Malayalam script. In the Tamil country, the modern Tamil script had supplanted Vattezhuthu by the 15th century, but in the Malabar region, Vattezhuthu remained in general use up to the 17th century, or the 18th century. A variant form of this script, Kolezhuthu, was used until about the 19th century mainly in the Malabar-Cochin area. Another variant form, Malayanma, was used in the south of Thiruvananthapuram. According to Arthur Coke Burnell, one form of the Grantha alphabet, originally used in the Chola dynasty, was imported into the southwest coast of India in  the 8th or 9th century, which was then modified in course of time in this secluded area, where communication with the east coast was very limited. It later evolved into Tigalari-Malayalam script was used by the Malayali, Havyaka Brahmins and Tulu Brahmin people, but was originally only applied to write Sanskrit. This script split into two scripts: Tigalari and Malayalam. While Malayalam script was extended and modified to write vernacular language Malayalam, the Tigalari was written for Sanskrit only. In Malabar, this writing system was termed Arya-eluttu (, "Ārya eḻuttŭ"), meaning “Arya writing” (Sanskrit is Indo-Aryan language while  Malayalam is a Dravidian language). Vatteluttu was in general use, but was not suitable for literature where many Sanskrit words were used. Like Tamil-Brahmi, it was originally used to write Tamil, and as such, did not have letters for voiced or aspirated consonants used in Sanskrit but not used in Tamil. For this reason, Vatteluttu and the Grantha alphabet were sometimes mixed, as in the Manipravalam. One of the oldest examples of the Manipravalam literature, "Vaishikatantram" (, "Vaiśikatantram"), dates back to the 12th century, where the earliest form of the Malayalam script was used, which seems to have been systematized  to some extent by the first half of the 13th century. It is Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan who is also credited with the development of Malayalam script into the current form through the intermixing and modification of the erstwhile scripts of "Vatteluttu", "Kolezhuthu", and Grantha script, which were used to write the inscriptions and literary works of Old and Middle Malayalam. He further eliminated excess and unnecessary letters from the modified script. Hence, Ezhuthachan is also known as "The Father of modern Malayalam". The development of modern Malayalam script was also heavily influenced by the Tigalari script, which was used to write  the Tulu language, due to the influence of Tuluva Brahmins in Kerala. Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan, a poet from around the 16th century, used Arya-eluttu to write his Malayalam poems based on Classical Sanskrit literature. For a few letters missing in Arya-eluttu ("ḷa", "ḻa", "ṟa"), he used Vatteluttu. His works became unprecedentedly popular to the point that the Malayali people eventually started to call him the father of the Malayalam language, which also popularized Arya-eluttu as a script to write Malayalam. However, Grantha did not have distinctions between "e" and "ē", and between "o" and "ō", as it was  as an alphabet to write a Sanskrit language. The Malayalam script as it is today was modified in the middle of the 19th century when Hermann Gundert invented the new vowel signs to distinguish them. By the 19th century, old scripts like Kolezhuthu had been supplanted by Arya-eluttu – that is the current Malayalam script. Nowadays, it is widely used in the press of the Malayali population in Kerala. Orthography reform. In 1971, the Government of Kerala reformed the orthography of Malayalam by a government order to the education department. The objective was to simplify the script for print and  typewriting technology of that time, by reducing the number of glyphs required. In 1967, the government appointed a committee headed by Sooranad Kunjan Pillai, who was the editor of the Malayalam Lexicon project. It reduced number of glyphs required for Malayalam printing from around 1000 to around 250. Above committee's recommendations were further modified by another committee in 1969. This proposal was later accepted by major newspapers in January 1971. The reformed script came into effect on 15 April 1971 (the Kerala New Year), by a government order released on 23 March 1971. Recommendations by the committees. Use non -ligating vowel signs for "u", "ū", and "r̥". In the traditional orthography, that had been taught in the primary education till that time, any consonant or consonant ligature followed by the vowel sign of "u", "ū", or "r̥" are represented by a cursive consonant-vowel ligature. The glyph of each consonant had its own way of ligating with these vowel signs. This irregularity was simplified in the reformed script. As per that, a vowel sign or the consonant sign would always have a disconnected symbol that does not fuse with the base consonant. Examples: Reph is replaced with "Chillu ṟa . In traditional orthography, the reph is represented by a dot over the subsequent letter. Instead of that, explicit stand-alone Chillu ṟa" would be used. Split uncommon conjuncts with "Chandrakkala". Also, most of traditional consonant-consonant ligatures, especially the less common ones only used to write words of Sanskrit origin, were split into non-ligated forms with explicit "chandrakkala". For example: Use non-ligating sign for conjoining "ra". Any consonant or consonant ligature followed by the conjoining "ra" is represented by a cursive tail attached to the consonant or the consonant-ligature. In the reformed script, this consonant sign would  be disconnected from the base and represented as a left-bracket like symbol placed on the left side of the cluster. Current status. Today the reformed orthography, is commonly called "put̪iya lipi" () and traditional system, "paḻaya lipi" (). Current print media almost entirely uses reformed orthography. The state run primary education introduces the Malayalam writing to the pupils in reformed script only and the books are printed accordingly. However, the digital media uses both traditional and reformed in almost equal proportions as the fonts for both the orthographies are commonly available. Description. Characteristics. 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, 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 , or 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. Malayalam alphabet is unicase, or does not have a case distinction. It is written from left to right, but certain vowel signs are attached to the left (the opposite direction) of a consonant letter that it logically follows. In the word ("Kēraḷam"), the vowel  sign ("ē") visually appears in the leftmost position, though the vowel "ē" logically follows the consonant "k". Malayalam letters. Vowels. Vowel letters and vowel signs. The following tables show the independent vowel letters and the corresponding dependent vowel signs (diacritics) of the Malayalam script, with romanizations in ISO 15919, transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). "r̥", "r̥̄", "l̥", "l̥̄", used to write Sanskrit words, are treated as vowels. They are called semi-vowels and are phonetically closer to vowels in Malayalam and in Classical Sanskrit where Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian, groups them with vowel sounds in his sutras. (see  Proto-Indo-European language and "Vedic Sanskrit"). The letters and signs for "r̥̄", "l̥", "l̥̄" are very rare, and are not considered as part of the modern orthography. The vowel signs "ā", "i", "ī" are placed to the right of a consonant letter to which it is attached. The vowel signs "e", "ē", "ai" are placed to the left of a consonant letter. The vowel signs "o" and "ō" consist of two parts: the first part goes to the left of a consonant letter and the second part goes to the right of it. In the reformed orthography, the vowel  signs "u", "ū", "r̥" are simply placed to the right of the consonant letter, while they often make consonant-vowel ligatures in the traditional orthography. It is important to note the vowel duration as it can be used to differentiate words that would otherwise be the same. For example, means "earthenware pot" while means "time" or "season". Anusvaram. An "anusvaram" ( "anusvāram"), or an "anusvara," originally denoted the nasalization where the preceding vowel was changed into a nasalized vowel, and hence is traditionally treated as a kind of vowel sign. In Malayalam, however, it simply represents a consonant after a vowel , though this may be assimilated to another nasal consonant. It is a special consonant letter, different from a "normal" consonant letter, in that it is never followed by an inherent vowel or another vowel. In general, an "anusvara" at the end of a word in an Indian language is transliterated as "ṁ" in ISO 15919, but a Malayalam "anusvara" at the end of a word is transliterated as "m" without a dot. Visargam. A "visargam" (, "visargam"), or "visarga", represents a consonant after a vowel, and is transliterated as "ḥ". Like the "anusvara", it is a special symbol, and is never  followed by an inherent vowel or another vowel. Consonants. Basic consonant letters. The following tables show the basic consonant letters of the Malayalam script, with romanizations in ISO 15919, transcriptions in IPA, and Unicode CHARACTER NAMES. The character names used in the report of the Government of Kerala committee (2001) are shown in "lowercase italics" when different from Unicode character names. Those alternative names are based on the traditional romanization used by the Malayali people. For example, "tha" in “Thiruvanan"tha"puram” is neither ISO tha nor Unicode THA, but "tha" in this sense (). The ISCII (IS 13194:1991) character names are given  in parentheses when different from the above. Chillus. A "chillu", or a "chillaksharam" (, "cillakṣaram"), is a special consonant letter that represents a pure consonant independently, without help of a virama. Unlike a consonant represented by an ordinary consonant letter, this consonant is never followed by an inherent vowel. Anusvara and visarga fit this definition but are not usually included. ISCII and Unicode 5.0 treat a "chillu" as a glyph variant of a normal (“base”) consonant letter. In Unicode 5.1 and later, however, "chillu" letters are treated as independent characters, encoded atomically. Six independent chillu letters (0D7A..0D7F) had been encoded  in Unicode 5.1., three additional chillu letters (0D54..0D56) were encoded with the publication of Unicode 9.0. Chandrakkala. The virama in Malayalam is called candrakkala (chandrakkala), it has two functions: As virama. "Chandrakkala" (, "candrakkala") is a diacritic attached to a consonant letter to show that the consonant is not followed by an inherent vowel or any other vowel (for example, "ka" → "k"). This kind of diacritic is common in Indic scripts, generically called "virama" in Sanskrit, or "halant" in Hindi. Half-u. At the end of a word, the same symbol sometimes represents a very short vowel, known as  “half-u”, or “samvruthokaram” (, '), or ' (). The exact pronunciation of this vowel varies from dialect to dialect, but it is approximately or , and transliterated as ŭ (for example, "na" → "nŭ"). Optionally, a vowel sign "u" is inserted, as in (= + + ). According to one author, this alternative form is historically more correct, though the simplified form without a vowel sign "u" is common nowadays. This means that the same spelling may represent either "n" or "nŭ" depending on the context. Generally, it is "nŭ" at the end of a word, and "n" elsewhere; always represents "nŭ". The virama of  Tigalari script behave similarly to Malayalam. Virama has three functions: to suppress the inherent vowel (as the halant of Devanagari); to form conjunct consonants; to represent the half-u. Devanagari supports half-u for Kashmiri; for example is written as नॖ. Ligatures. Consonant ligatures. Like in other Indic scripts, a virama is used in the Malayalam script to cancel—or “kill”—the inherent vowel of a consonant letter and represent a consonant without a vowel, so-called a “dead” consonant. For example, If this "n" is further followed by another consonant letter, for example, "ma" , the result may look like , which  represents "nma" as "na" + virama + "ma". In this case, two elements "n" and "ma" are simply placed one by one, side by side. Alternatively, "nma" can be also written as a ligature . Generally, when a dead consonant letter C and another consonant letter C are conjoined, the result may be either: If the result is fully or half-conjoined, the (conceptual) virama which made C dead becomes invisible, only logically existing in a character encoding scheme such as Unicode. If the result is non-ligated, a virama is visible, attached to C. The glyphs for "nma" has a  visible virama if not ligated (), but if ligated, the virama disappears (). Usually the difference between those forms is superficial and both are semantically identical, just like the meaning of the English word "palaeography" does not change even if it is spelled "palæography", with the ligature æ. Common consonant ligatures. Several consonant-consonant ligatures are used commonly even in the new orthography. The ligature "mpa" was historically derived from "npa" . The ligatures "cca", "bba", "yya", and "vva" are special in that a doubled consonant is denoted by a triangle sign below a consonant letter. Consonant + "ya", "va", "la", "ra". In  kya , a variant form of "ya" () is placed after the full form of "ka" , just like "ki" is written "ka" followed by the vowel sign "i" . In other words, the variant form of "ya" () used after a consonant letter can be considered as a diacritic. Since it is placed after the base character, it is sometimes referred to as a "post-base" form. An exception is "yya" (see above). An exception is "vva" (see above). Section::::"nṯa" and "ṯṯa". The ligature "nṯa" is written as "n" + "ṟa" and pronounced . The ligature "ṯṯa" is written as "ṟ" + "ṟa" . In those  two ligatures, a small "ṟa" is written below the first letter ("chillu-n" if it is a dead "n"). Alternatively, the letter "ṟa" is sometimes written to the right of the first letter, making a digraph (just like used instead of in Greek). The spelling is therefore read either "nṟa" (two separate letters) or "nṯa" (digraph) depending on the word. Similarly, is read either "ṟaṟa" or "ṯṯa". Dot reph. In the traditional orthography, a dead consonant "r" before a consonant sometimes takes an above-base form, known as a "dot reph", which looks like a short vertical line or a  dot. Generally, a "chillu-r" is used instead of a dot reph in the reformed orthography. Numeral System. Malayalam numeral system is archaic and no longer commonly used. Instead, the common Hindu-Arabic numeral system is followed. Number "11" is written as "൰൧" and not "൧൧". "32" is written as "൩൰൨" similar to the Tamil numeral system. Suppose the number is "2013". It is read in Malayalam as "രണ്ടായിരത്തി പതിമൂന്ന്" (raṇḍāyiratti padimūnnu). It is split into : Combine them together to get the Malayalam number "൨൲൰൩". Sample text. English. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights . They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Malayalam. മനുഷ്യരെല്ലാവരും തുല്യാവകാശങ്ങളോടും അന്തസ്സോടും സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യത്തോടുംകൂടി ജനിച്ചിട്ടുള്ളവരാണ്‌. അന്യോന്യം ഭ്രാതൃഭാവത്തോടെ പെരുമാറുവാനാണ്‌ മനുഷ്യനു വിവേകബുദ്ധിയും മനസാക്ഷിയും സിദ്ധമായിരിക്കുന്നത്‌. Romanisation (ISO 15919). man̠uṣyarellāvaruṁ tulyāvakāśaṅṅaḷōṭuṁ antassōṭuṁ svātantryattōṭuṅkūṭi jan̠icciṭṭuḷḷavarāṇ‌ŭ. an̠yōn̠yaṁ bhrātr̥bhāvattōṭe perumāṟuvān̠āṇ‌ŭ man̠uṣyan̠u vivēkabuddhiyuṁ man̠asākṣiyuṁ siddhamāyirikkunnat‌ŭ. IPA. /manuʂjaɾellaːʋaɾum tuljaːʋaɡaːʃaŋŋaɭoːɖum an̪d̪assoːɖum sʋaːd̪an̪d̪ryat̪t̪oːɖuŋguːɖi d͡ʒanit͡:ʃiʈʈuɭɭaʋaɾaːɳɨ̆ ǁ anjoːnjːam bʱraːtribʱaːʋat̪t̪oːɖe peɾumaːruʋaːnaːɳɨ̆ manuʂjanu ʋiʋeːɡabuddʱijum manasaːkʂijum siddʱamaːjiɾikkun̪n̪ad̪ɨ̆ ǁ/ Unicode. Malayalam script was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0. Block. The Unicode block for Malayalam is U+0D00–U+0D7F: Chillus in Unicode. For example, "avan" (“he”) is written as "a" +  va + "chillu-n" , where "chillu-n" represents the "n" sound without a vowel. In other Indic scripts, the same word would be possibly written as "a" + "va" + "na" + virama. However, in Malayalam script, that sequence represents a different word, "avanŭ" (“to him”), and is not interchangeable with "avan". This is because in modern Malayalam script, the sign for a virama also works as the sign for a vowel "ŭ" at the end of a word, and is not able to cleanly “kill” the inherent vowel in this case. To differentiate a pure consonant ("chillu") and a  consonant with "ŭ", zero-width joiner (ZWJ) and zero-width non-joiner (ZWNJ) were used before Unicode 5.1. However, this system was problematic. Among other things, glyph variants specified by ZWJ or ZWNJ are supposed to be non-semantic, whereas a "chillu" (expressed as letter + virama + ZWJ) and the same consonant followed by a "ŭ" (expressed as letter + virama + ZWNJ) are often semantically different. After a long debate, Nine "chillu letters" now have their own code points since Unicode 9.0, though applications should also be prepared to handle data in the representation specified in Unicode 5.0 . This means, fonts should display chillus in both sequences; while an input method should output standard chillus. The ligature "nṯa" ന്റ is very common and supported by most Malayalam fonts in one way or another, but exactly how it should be encoded was not clear in Unicode 5.0 and earlier, and two incompatible implementations are currently in use. In Unicode 5.1 (2008), the sequence to represent it was explicitly redefined as "chillu-n" + virama + "ṟa" ().