Malayalam script
The Malayalam script (Malayāḷalipi; IPA: [mələjaːɭə lɪpɪ]), also known as Kairali script is a Brahmic script used commonly to write Malayalam, which is the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 35 million people in the world. Malayalam script is also widely used for writing Sanskrit texts in Kerala.
Like many other Indic scripts, it is an alphasyllabary (abugida), a writing system that is partially “alphabetic” and partially syllable-based. The modern Malayalam alphabet has 15 vowel letters, 41 consonant letters, and a few other symbols. Today's Malayalam script is based on the Grantha alphabet extended with symbols from the Vatteluttu alphabet. Earlier, Vatteluttu was used primarily and Grantha was only used to represent loanwords from Sanskrit. Later, the Grantha script itself came to be used for all words and only the few letters needed to represent Dravidian sounds not phonemic in Sanskrit were borrowed from Vatteluttu to give rise to the Malayalam script.
The script is also used to write several minority languages such as Paniya, Betta Kurumba, and Ravula. The Malayalam language itself was historically written in several different scripts.
