A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c19.s5.1

c19.s5.1

Malayālam was the last of the South Indian languages to develop a separate existence and a literature of its own. In the Śangam age, the present Malayālam area was a land of Tamil speech though grammarians recognized that the dialect of the mountain country deviated from standard Tamil in many ways. The Śangam literature contains many words and expressions that survive in Malayālam today though they have gone out of use in Tamil. Attempts to derive Malayālam from Sanskrit or to postulate for it an origin independent alike of Sanskrit and Tamil are clearly misplaced, and there can be no doubt that it was a natural growth through centuries from the form of ‘Koḍum-Tamil’ that prevailed in Kerala at the beginning of the Christian era. The literary idiom of Malayālam, like that of Kannada and Telugu, borrowed freely from Sanskrit, and in order to express the Sanskrit sounds adequately, it had to discard the old Vaṭṭeḻuttu script and evolve a new script based on Tamil-grantha. This happened perhaps about the tenth century or a little later. The early inscriptions of the country used the grantha script for Sanskrit words in the midst of Tamil-Malayālam written in Vaṭṭeḻuttu.