In addition to these forms most widely spread among the areas specified above, there are dozens of other forms such as 'kotumpu' (Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram), 'katirpu', krali, pattachi, gnannil, 'pochata' etc. 'Kozhinnul' and 'kulannilu' are the forms most common in and respectively. 'Kola' is the expression attested in most of the panchayats in the, and districts of, whereas 'kolachil' occurs most predominantly in and and 'klannil' in and. To cite a single example of language variation along the geographical parameter, it may be noted that there are as many as seventy seven different expressions employed by the and spread over various geographical points just to refer to a single item, namely, the flower bunch of coconut. Differences between any two given dialects can be quantified in terms of the presence or absence of specific units at each level of the language. This number is reported to tally approximately with the number of principalities that existed during the pre-British period in.ĭivergence among dialects of Malayalam embrace almost all aspects of language such as phonetics, phonology, grammar and vocabulary. Sub-dialect regions, which could be marked off, were found to be thirty. Thus for examples, the survey of the dialect of Malayalam, results of which have been published by the Department in 1974, has brought to light the existence of twelve major dialect areas for Malayalam, although the isoglosses are found to crisscross in many instances. As regards the geographical dialects of Malayalam, surveys conducted so far by the Department of Linguistics, University of Kerala restricted the focus of attention during a given study on one specific caste so as to avoid mixing up of more than one variable such as communal and geographical factors. Whereas both the Namboothiri and Nair dialects have a common nature, the is among the most divergent of dialects, differing considerably from literary Malayalam. The community dialects are: Namboodiri, Nair, Pulaya, and Nasrani. And by the end of the 13th century a written form of the language emerged which was unique from the Tamil-Brahmi script that was used to write Tamil. The Malayalam script began to diverge from the Tamil-Brahmi script in the 8th and 9th centuries CE. As the language of scholarship and administration, Old-Tamil, which was written in and the Vatteluttu alphabet later, greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam. This is based on the fact that Malayalam and several Dravidian languages on the western coast have common features which are not found even in the oldest historical forms of Tamil., in his 1856 book ' A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages', opined that Malayalam branched from Classical Tamil and over time gained a large amount of vocabulary and lost the personal terminations of verbs. Some scholars however believe that both Tamil and Malayalam developed during the prehistoric period from a common ancestor, 'Proto-Tamil-Dravidian', and that the notion of Malayalam being a 'daughter' of Tamil is misplaced.