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The Malayalam script is an abugida of the Brahmic family, used to write the Malayalam language. From the Brahmi script, the Grantha script was emerged as one of the earliest Southern scripts. It further evolved to the Malayalam script. Malayalam script covers all alphabets of Sanskrit as well as special Dravidian letters. An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... Malayalam ( ) is the language spoken predominantly in the state of Kerala, in southern India. ... Not to be confused with the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... This chart shows concisely the most common way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is applied to represent the English language. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Image File history File links Example. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria. ... An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria. ... Malayalam ( ) is the language spoken predominantly in the state of Kerala, in southern India. ... Brāhmī refers to the pre-modern members of the Brahmic family of scripts, attested from the 3rd century BC. The best known and earliest dated inscriptions in Brahmi are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka. ... Grantha (from Sanskrit ग्रन्थ grantha meaning book or manuscript) is an ancient script that was prevalent in South India. ... The Sanskrit language ( , for short ) is an old Indo-Aryan language from the Indian Subcontinent, the classical literary language of the Hindus of India[1], a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 23 official languages of India. ...

Picture showing the relation of Malayalam to Brahmi

The alphabet is classified into two categories: swarams (or vowels) and vyanjanams (or consonants). Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (631x868, 8 KB) vaastusastra, posted in SSC Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1. ... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (631x868, 8 KB) vaastusastra, posted in SSC Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1. ... Malayalam (മലയാളം ) is the language spoken predominantly in the state of Kerala, in southern India. ... Brāhmī refers to the pre-modern members of the Brahmic family of scripts, attested from the 3rd century BC. The best known and earliest dated inscriptions in Brahmi are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure or stricture of the vocal tract sufficient to cause audible turbulence. ...

If you don't have a font that has Malayalam characters and Unicode support, the Malayalam characters in the following tables may not appear correctly. Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ...

Vowels

Consonants

There is no distinction of case, i.e. no uppercase and lowercase letters. Diacritics, or vowel signs, are used to associate a vowel to a consonant. When no diacritic is used, the vowel sound 'a' is assumed. To denote the absence of a vowel specifically, a chandrakkala ് (also called virama) is used.

Other symbols

In addition to these symbols, there are many more symbols to indicate ligatures of the various consonants with each other. Virama is a generic term for the diacritic character in many Brahmic scripts that is used to suppress an inherent vowel sound that occurs with every consonant character. ... Anusvaara (or anusvaaram) appears in the alphabet of Indian languages like Sanskrit which use the Devanagari script, and in the Dravidian languages. ...

Digits

Malayalam digits are written as follows:

Malayalam in Unicode

The Unicode range for Malayalam is U+0D00 ... U+0D7F. Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ...

See also

• List of alphabets
• Grantha script

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into List of writing systems. ... Grantha (from Sanskrit ग्रन्थ grantha meaning book or manuscript) is an ancient script that was prevalent in South India. ...

External links

• Website including resources for learning Malayalam script
• Unicode Code Chart for Malayalam (PDF Format)
• Malayalam Unicode fonts
• Indian Language Converter Web-based tool to transliterate from Romanised English to Unicode Malayalam
• 'moodle' in Malayalam Virtual Learning Environment