| Language Information |
The word "Malayalam" originally meant as mountainous country where mala means the mountain and alam means the place. Malayalam belongs to the southern group of Dravidian languages along with Tamil, Kota, Kodagu and Kannada. It has high affinity towards Tamil. The origin of Malayalam as a distinct language may be traced to the last quarter of 9th Century A.D. Malayalam first appeared in writing in the vazhappalli inscription which dates from about 830 AD. In the early thirteenth century the Malayalam script began to develop from a script known as vattezhuthu (round writing), a descendant of the Brahmi script. But malayalam as we know now is greatly simplified from 900 glyphs, which it originally had.
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