What is "malayalam"

Malayalam \Ma"la*ya"lam\, prop. n. The name given to one the cultivated Dravidian languages, closely related to the Tamil.
--Yule.

1837, Dravidian language of Malabar, from Dravidian Malayali, from mala "mountain" + al "possess."

Malayalam is a language spoken in India, predominantly in the state of Kerala. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and was designated a Classical Language in India on 2013. It was developed to the current form by the poet Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan in the 16th century. Malayalam has official language status in the state of Kerala and in the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry. It belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is spoken by some 38 million people. Malayalam is also spoken in the neighboring states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka; with some speakers in the Nilgiris, Kanyakumari and Coimbatore districts of Tamil Nadu, and the Dakshina Kannada and the Kodagu district of Karnataka.

Malayalam originated from Middle Tamil (Sen-Tamil) in the 6th century. An alternative theory proposes a split in even more ancient times. Malayalam incorporated many elements from Sanskrit through the ages. Before Malayalam came into being, Old Tamil was used in literature and courts of a region called Tamilakam, including present day Kerala state, a famous example being Silappatikaram. Silappatikaram was written by Chera prince Ilango Adigal from Chunkaparra, and is considered a classic in Sangam literature. Modern Malayalam still preserves many words from the ancient Tamil vocabulary of Sangam literature. The earliest script used to write Malayalam was the Vatteluttu alphabet, and later the Kolezhuttu, which derived from it. As Malayalam began to freely borrow words as well as the rules of grammar from Sanskrit, the Grantha alphabet was adopted for writing and came to be known as Arya Eluttu. This developed into the modern Malayalam script. Many medieval liturgical texts were written in an admixture of Sanskrit and early Malayalam, called Manipravalam. The oldest literary work in Malayalam, distinct from the Tamil tradition, is dated from between the 9th and 11th centuries. The first travelogue in any Indian language is the Malayalam Varthamanappusthakam, written by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar in 1785.

Due to its lineage deriving from both Tamil and Sanskrit, the Malayalam script has the largest number of letters among the Indian language orthographies. The Malayalam script includes letters capable of representing almost all the sounds of all Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages.

Malayalam is a Unicode block containing characters for the Malayalam language. In its original incarnation, the code points U+0D02..U+0D4D were a direct copy of the Malayalam characters A2-ED from the 1988 ISCII standard. The Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada blocks were similarly all based on their ISCII encodings.