It is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people.

[8] The script is also used to write several minority languages such as Paniya, Betta Kurumba, and Ravula.

'round writing') is a script that had evolved from Tamil-Brahmi and was once used extensively in the southern part of present-day Tamil Nadu and in Kerala.

The Vazhappally inscription issued by Rajashekhara Varman is the earliest example, dating from about 830 CE.

[12] According to Arthur Coke Burnell, one form of the Grantha alphabet, originally used in the Chola dynasty, was imported into the southwest coast of India in the 8th or 9th century, which was then modified in course of time in this secluded area, where communication with the east coast was very limited.

[18] Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan, a poet from around the 16th century,[19] used Arya-eluttu to write his Malayalam poems based on Classical Sanskrit literature.

The Malayalam script as it is today was modified in the middle of the 19th century when Hermann Gundert invented the new vowel signs to distinguish them.

[21][22] The objective was to simplify the script for print and typewriting technology of that time, by reducing the number of glyphs required.

In 1967, the government appointed a committee headed by Sooranad Kunjan Pillai, who was the editor of the Malayalam Lexicon project.

The reformed script came into effect on 15 April 1971 (the Kerala New Year), by a government order released on 23 March 1971.

Examples: Also, most of traditional consonant-consonant ligatures, especially the less common ones only used to write words of Sanskrit origin, were split into non-ligated forms with explicit chandrakkala.

In the reformed script, this consonant sign would be disconnected from the base and represented as a left-bracket like symbol placed on the left side of the cluster.

The state run primary education introduces the Malayalam writing to the pupils in reformed script only and the books are printed accordingly.

However, the digital media uses both traditional and reformed in almost equal proportions as the fonts for both the orthographies are commonly available.

The following tables show the basic consonant letters of the Malayalam script, with romanizations in ISO 15919, transcriptions in IPA, and Unicode CHARACTER NAMES.

ISCII and Unicode 5.0 treat a chillu as a glyph variant of a normal ("base") consonant letter.

[30] The virama in Malayalam is called candrakkala (chandrakkala), it has two functions:[31][32][a] Chandrakkala  ് (ചന്ദ്രക്കല, candrakkala) is a diacritic attached to a consonant letter to show that the consonant is not followed by an inherent vowel or any other vowel (for example, ക ka → ക് k).

This kind of diacritic is common in Indic scripts, generically called virama in Sanskrit, or halant in Hindi.

At the end of a word, the same symbol sometimes represents a very short vowel, known as "half-u", or "samvruthokaram" (സംവൃതോകാരം, saṁvr̥tōkāram), or kuṯṯiyal ukaram (കുറ്റിയൽ ഉകരം).

Virama has three functions: to suppress the inherent vowel (as the halant of Devanagari); to form conjunct consonants; to represent the half-u.

Generally, when a dead consonant letter C1 and another consonant letter C2 are conjoined, the result may be either: If the result is fully or half-conjoined, the (conceptual) virama which made C1 dead becomes invisible, only logically existing in a character encoding scheme such as Unicode.

Usually the difference between those forms is superficial and both are semantically identical, just like the meaning of the English word palaeography does not change even if it is spelled palæography, with the ligature æ.

In other words, the variant form of ya (്യ) used after a consonant letter can be considered as a diacritic.

Before the vertical bar virama used to cut through the main consonant and it led to the creation of the chillu letters.

/manuʂjaɾellaːʋaɾum t̪uljaːʋakaːʃaŋŋaɭoːʈum an̪t̪assoːʈum sʋaːt̪an̪tɾjat̪t̪oːʈuŋkuːʈi d͡ʒanit͡ʃt͡ʃiʈʈuɭɭaʋaɾaːɳɨ̆ ǁ anjoːnjam bʱraːt̪rɨ̆bʱaːʋat̪t̪oːʈe peɾumaːruʋaːnaːɳɨ̆ manuʂjanɨ̆ ʋiʋeːkabud̪d̪ʱijum manasaːkʂijum sid̪d̪ʱamaːjiɾikkun̪ːat̪ɨ̆ ǁ/ Malayalam script was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0.

In other Indic scripts, the same word would be possibly written as a + va + na + virama.

However, in Malayalam script, that sequence represents a different word, avanŭ അവന്‌ ("to him"), and is not interchangeable with avan.

Among other things, glyph variants specified by ZWJ or ZWNJ are supposed to be non-semantic, whereas a chillu (expressed as letter + virama + ZWJ) and the same consonant followed by a ŭ (expressed as letter + virama + ZWNJ) are often semantically different.

The ligature nṯa ന്റ is very common and supported by most Malayalam fonts in one way or another, but exactly how it should be encoded was not clear in Unicode 5.0 and earlier, and two incompatible implementations are currently in use.

[29] ന്റ ligature is often considered to be the correct form to represent n̠d̠ as ൻറ can also represent n̠r̠ but in many computers it is only shown with ൻ + ് + റ even though a chandrakkala cannot be after a chillu letter, other computers show it with ന + ് + റ.