Blue = majority or plurality speak Malayalam
Light blue = A significant minority speak Malayalam or Malayalam languages are spoken alongside other languages
Malayalam is written in a non-Latin script. Malayalam text used in this article is transliterated into the Latin script according to the ISO 15919 standard.
The origin of Malayalam remains a matter of dispute among scholars. The mainstream view holds that Malayalam descends from a western coastal dialect of early Middle Tamil and separated from it sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries.[14][15] This western dialect also preserved some archaisms suggesting an earlier divergence of the spoken dialects in the prehistoric period. A second view argues for the development of the two languages out of "Proto-Dravidian" or "Proto-Tamil-Malayalam" either in the prehistoric period or in the middle of the first millennium A.D.,[16][17][18] although this is generally rejected by historical linguists.[19] The Quilon Syrian copper plates of 849/850 CE are considered by some to be the oldest available inscription written in Old Malayalam. However, the existence of Old Malayalam is sometimes disputed by scholars.[20] They regard the Chera Perumal inscriptional language as a diverging dialect or variety of contemporary Tamil.[20][21] The oldest extant literary work in Malayalam distinct from the Tamil tradition is Ramacharitam (late 12th or early 13th century).[22]
Robert Caldwell describes the extent of Malayalam in the 19th century as extending from the vicinity of Kumbla in the north where it supersedes with Tulu to Kanyakumari in the south, where it begins to be superseded by Tamil,[28] beside the inhabited islands of Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea.
^Statement 1: Abstract of speakers' strength of languages and mother tongues – 2011". www.censusindia.gov.in. Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India. [1]Archived 14 November 2018 at the Wayback Machine
^Subramoniam, V. I. (1997). Dravidian encyclopaedia. vol. 3, Language and literature. Thiruvananthapuram: International School of Dravidian Linguistics.
Cit-P-487. Dravidian EncyclopediaArchived 29 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine
^Shulman, David (2016). Tamil: A Biography. Harvard University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1g69zdt. ISBN978-0-674-05992-4. JSTORj.ctt1g69zdt."There has been a tendency among historical linguists to think of Malayalam as having diverged
directly from Tamil (the Tamil spoken from ancient times in what is today
Kerala), perhaps as late as the thirteenth century. But this view is almost
certainly wrong. Tamil and Malayalam must have separated from one another at
a much earlier stage, perhaps around the middle of the first millennium A.D., as
we can see from several surviving archaic features of Malayalam."
^Karashima 2014, p. 6: Other sources date this split to the 7th and 8th centuries.
^S.V. Shanmugam (1976). "Formation and Development of Malayalam", Indian Literature, Vol. 19, No. 3 (May–June 1976), pp. 5–30. JSTOR24157306 "Yet, some scholars of Malayalam still believe that Malayalam should have originated independently from the Proto-Dravidian at a very early stage [...] The native scholars are unwilling to accept Malayalam as an ausbau language; instead they take it to be an abstand language 'language by distance' contrary to historical evidence (pp.9–10)".
^Cite error: The named reference vinodh rajan was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Mathrubhumi Yearbook Plus – 2019 (Malayalam ed.). Kozhikode: P. V. Chandran, Managing Editor, Mathrubhumi Printing & Publishing Company Limited, Kozhikode. 2018. p. 454. ASIN8182676444.
^Menon, A. Sreedhara (2008). The legacy of Kerala (1st DCB ed.). Kottayam, Kerala: D C Books. ISBN978-81-264-2157-2.
^Caldwell, Robert (1998). A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Or South-Indian Family of Languages. Asian Educational Services. pp. 6, 16, 17–19, 20, 21–25. ISBN978-81-206-0117-8. Malayalam is spoken along the Malabar coast, on the western side of the Ghauts, or Malaya range of mountains, from the vicinity of Kumbla near Mangalore, where it supersedes Tuļu, to Kanyakumari, where it begins to be superseded by Tamil. (Pages 6, 16, 20, 31)