Malayalam is spoken mainly in India, where it is the official language of the state of Kerala and the union territory of Lakshadweep. In the early 21st century, Malayalam was spoken by more than 35 million people.
Malayalam has three important regional dialects and a number of smaller ones. There is some difference in dialect along social, particularly caste, lines.
Like the Dravidian languages generally, Malayalam has a series of retroflex consonants (/ḍ/, /ṇ/, and /ṭ/) made by curling the tip of the tongue back to the roof of the mouth. It uses subject–object–verb word order and has a nominative-accusative case-marking pattern. Its pronominal system has “natural” gender, a form that marks the gender of humans masculine or feminine while designating all nonhuman nouns as neuter. Inflection is generally marked via suffixation. Unlike other Dravidian languages, Malayalam inflects its finite verb only for tense—not for person, number, or gender.
Course: Two Months . Reading Writing and Speaking
