Malayalam is spoken by 35.9 million people. Malayalam is also spoken in the Nilgiris district,Kanyakumari district and coimbatore of Tamil Nadu,Dakshina Kannada,Bangalore and Kodagu districts of Karnataka.
Malayalam most likely originated from ancient Tamil.
The word 'Malayalam' is formed from two words, Mala meaning "mountain" and alam meaning "region" (derived from the root al meaning "to posses", "to rule", etc.). Malayalam would thus translate as "mountain region".The origin of Malayalam, whether it was a from a dialect of Tamil or an independent off shoot of the Proto Dravidian language, has been and continues to be an engaging pursuit among comparative historical linguists.Either way, its generally agreed that by the end of 13th century a written form of the language emerged which was definitely different from Tamil.
The earliest known poem in Malayalam Ramacharitam, dated to 12th century C.E, was completed before the introduction of Sanskrit alphabet and shows the same phase of the language as in Jewish and Syrian Saasanas (dated to mid eighth century C.E). But the period of the earliest available literary document cannot be the sole criterion used to determine the antiquity of a language. In its early literature, Malayalam has songs,Paattu, on various subjects and occasions like harvesting, love songs, heroes, Gods etc. A form of writing called,Champu emerged from the 14th century onwards, which mixed poetry with prose and used a heavily Sanskritized vocabulary with themes from epics and Puranas.
Together with Tamil,Toda,Kannada and Tulu, Malayalam belongs to the southern group of Dravidian languages Some believe Proto-Tamil, the common stock of ancient Tamil and Malayalam, apparently diverged over a period of four or five centuries from the 9th century on, resulting in the emergence of Malayalam as a language distinct from Proto-Tamil.
