Malayalam Script

The Malayalam script (മലയാളം ലിപി) is an abugida used to write the Malayalam language, spoken by 38+ million people primarily in Kerala (India) and the Gulf NRI community. It descends from the ancient Grantha script, a variant of Brahmi used in South India to write Sanskrit. Modern Malayalam script has 15 vowels, 36 consonants, and extensive diacritic marks. It is written left-to-right. Malayalam is notable for having one of the largest character inventories among Indian scripts — richer than Tamil, similar in depth to Devanagari — because it encodes Sanskrit-derived phonemes (aspirated consonants, voiced aspirated) that Tamil does not, alongside native Dravidian retroflex sounds. The script uses extensive sandhi (phonetic junction) rules — when two words combine, their boundary sounds merge, producing conjunct forms that must be rendered correctly. Malayalam text shaping is therefore one of the more complex Indic-script rendering challenges; video editors and subtitle tools frequently fail on Malayalam where they'd succeed on Hindi.

How it works

Malayalam letter set: vowels അ ആ ഇ ഈ ഉ ഊ ഋ എ ഏ ഐ ഒ ഓ ഔ; consonants cover 5 velars, 5 palatals, 5 retroflexes, 5 dentals, 5 bilabials, plus semivowels and fricatives — a complete Indic consonant inventory including aspirated pairs (ക കക cause duplicate rendering issues, ഖ /kʰa/, ഘ /gʱa/, etc.). Malayalam has two script styles: the older "traditional" script (പഴയ ലിപി) with more complex ligatures and the reformed "simplified" script (പുതിയ ലിപി) adopted in the 1970s with fewer conjunct forms. Most modern digital Malayalam uses the reformed script. Sandhi in Malayalam text is written as conjunct forms — e.g., സ്ത്രീ (woman) combines സ + ത് + ര + ീ. Unicode block U+0D00–U+0D7F covers Malayalam.

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