59 curious facts about Malayalam and the world’s languages

Why does Malayalam have two words for “we”? Which Kerala words came from Portuguese and Dutch sailors? And why does the name read the same backwards? Here are 59 short, true facts about Malayalam and the languages around it. Share your favourite.

Where Malayalam comes from

1. The name MALAYALAM reads the same backwards in English letters. Try it: M-A-L-A-Y-A-L-A-M. Very few language names are palindromes.
2. Malayalam is a Dravidian language. Its closest relative is Tamil, and Telugu and Kannada are sisters too. Hindi is not in the family: it is Indo-European, the same family as English.
3. Scholars describe Malayalam as growing out of a western coastal form of early Tamil and separating gradually, roughly between the 9th and 13th centuries. The exact dates are still debated.
4. The Western Ghats mountains cut the Kerala coast off from the Tamil plains, which helped the two languages drift apart.
5. Kerala sits between Tamil to the south and east and Kannada in the far north. Southern Kerala speech shares words with Tamil; northern speech shares sounds with Kannada, such as baa (come) and bere (other).
6. An old Dravidian p sound regularly became h in Kannada. So Malayalam പാൽ (paal) for milk is haalu in Kannada.
7. Tamil and Malayalam share many proverbs almost word for word.

A dictionary written by traders

1. Malayalam has three word stocks: everyday Malayalam, formal words from Sanskrit, and English.
2. Sanskrit was the first big borrowing layer. Formal words such as അഭിപ്രായം (opinion) and ഭയങ്കര (terrible, or “very” in casual speech) come from it.
3. The spice trade brought Arabic words: ബാക്കി (baaki) (the balance, what is left) and വക്കീൽ (vakkeel) (lawyer).
4. Portuguese sailors left മേശ (mesha) (table, from mesa) and അലമാര (alamaara) (cupboard, from armário).
5. The everyday word for toilet, കക്കൂസ് (kakkoos), is traced to Dutch traders.
6. English is the newest and biggest layer. Malayalam even turns English words into verbs with ചെയ്യുക (cheyyuka) (do): cancel cheyyuka, drive cheyyuka. Hindi does the same with karna, and Japanese with suru.
7. Office words like file, office and leave came into Malayalam through British-era administration.
8. പ്രവാസി (pravasi), the word for a Malayali living abroad, comes from Sanskrit pravaasa, living away from home.
9. Hindi’s word for “but”, lekin, came from Arabic through Persian.

Grammar surprises

1. Things have no gender in Malayalam. Every object is simply അത് (athu) (that) or ഇത് (ithu) (this). Learners of French or Hindi often bring gender along by mistake.
2. Verbs don’t change for the person. Hindi says vah aaya for “he came” and vah aayi for “she came”; Malayalam says വന്നു (vannu) for everyone. Tamil kept person endings on verbs; Malayalam dropped them.
3. Describing words never change. Hindi achha becomes achhi for a girl, but നല്ല (nalla) stays the same for everyone and everything.
4. Malayalam puts the verb last, like Japanese: ഞാൻ ചായ കുടിച്ചു (njan chaya kudichu) is literally “I tea drank”. Copying English word order is the fastest way to sound foreign.
5. Malayalam builds words like trains, adding piece after piece, as Turkish, Japanese, Korean and Finnish do. Turkish evlerimizde means “in our houses” in one word. Linguists see a similar build here, not a proven family tie.
6. There are two words for “we”: നമ്മൾ (nammal) includes the person you are talking to, and ഞങ്ങൾ (njangal) leaves them out. Tamil, Telugu, Malay (kita and kami) and northern Mandarin (zanmen) make the same split; Hindi and English don’t.
7. Malayalam is not a tone language. In Mandarin, changing the pitch of ma changes the word itself; in Malayalam, pitch changes your attitude, not the dictionary meaning.
8. Add -o and a statement becomes a question: കഴിച്ചോ? (kazhicho?) means “did you eat?”. Japanese does the same job with ka, and Tamil with -aa.
9. ആണ് (aanu) and ഉണ്ട് (undu) split the work of “to be”, a little like Spanish ser and estar.
10. Malayalam happily drops “I” and “you” when the situation makes it clear, like Japanese and Korean. Spanish drops them for a different reason: the verb ending already shows who.

Politeness and the many kinds of “you”

1. French has two words for “you” (tu and vous), Hindi has three (tu, tum and aap), and Malayalam uses നീ (nee) with close friends and children and നിങ്ങൾ (ningal) for politeness or more than one person.
2. Kerala homes use family words instead of a Hindi-style -ji: ചേച്ചി (chechi) (older sister) and ചേട്ടാ (chetta) (older brother) for anyone a little older.
3. Malayalis rarely just “go”. They say പോയിട്ട് വരാം (poyittu varam), “I’ll go and come back”. Japanese says ittekimasu, which means almost exactly the same, and Tamil says poyittu varen.
4. Korean has two goodbyes: annyeonghi gyeseyo is said to the person who stays, and annyeonghi gaseyo to the person who leaves.
5. പിന്നെ കാണാം (pinne kaanaam) (see you later) is the Malayalam twin of French à plus tard and Spanish hasta luego.
6. Young Koreans use a casual style called banmal with friends, and young people in Spain use the casual tú far more than their grandparents did.

How people really talk

1. Feelings happen to you. എനിക്ക് വിശക്കുന്നു (enikku vishakkunnu) is literally “to me, hunger”. Hindi says mujhe bhookh lagi hai the same way, while Spanish says tengo hambre, “I have hunger”.
2. Russian mne kazhetsya, Spanish me parece and Hindi mujhe lagta hai all mean “it seems to me”, built the same way Malayalam builds its opinions.
3. To soften a request, Malayalam adds ഒന്ന് (onnu) (literally “one”). German adds mal (from einmal, once), Hindi zara, Korean jom and Japanese chotto, all meaning “a little”.
4. Small tags carry big feelings: കേട്ടോ (ketto) works like Japanese ne, and അല്ലേ (alle) like Spanish ¿verdad?
5. Japanese listeners keep saying small things like sou desu ka while you talk; they are called aizuchi. Malayalis do the same with ആണോ? (aano?) and അതേ (athe).
6. അയ്യോ (ayyo) isn’t only Malayalam: Tamil, Kannada and Telugu speakers say it too.
7. “Enough” is മതി (mathi) in Malayalam, podhum in Tamil and saaku in Kannada.
8. Malayalam closes a quote with എന്ന് (ennu), much as Japanese closes one with to. English and Hindi put “he said that” first instead.
9. Japanese is famous for doubled sound words such as doki doki for a thumping heart and kira kira for sparkling.
10. On the phone, Malayalis say ഹലോ, borrowed from English. Italians say pronto, “ready”, and Japanese callers say moshi moshi, from an old polite “I speak, I speak”.

Proverbs, jokes and reading the room

1. Malayalam has a proverb about even an elephant slipping. Japanese says the same thing with monkeys: saru mo ki kara ochiru, even monkeys fall from trees.
2. Spanish poco a poco se va lejos means “little by little, one goes far”, which is also the best advice for learning any language.
3. Japanese puns are called dajare, and groan-worthy dad jokes are oyaji gyagu, “old man’s gags”. Tamil speakers call a lame joke mokka.
4. Korean has a word, nunchi, for the skill of reading the mood in a room. The anthropologist Edward Hall called cultures like this “high-context”: much is understood without being said.
5. In Japanese, a trailing chotto… (“a little…”) is often a polite way of saying no.
6. Japanese nemawashi means quietly sounding everyone out before a meeting, so that the meeting itself goes smoothly.
7. A Japanese host may say go-enryo naku, “without holding back”; an Arabic host says tafaddal, “please go ahead”.
8. Stories begin with a doubled word in some languages: Japanese mukashi mukashi (“long, long ago”), while German says es war einmal, “it was once”.

Words with surprising roots

1. Irony comes from Greek eironeia, pretending not to know. Sarcasm comes from Greek sarkazein, to tear flesh.
2. Fluent comes from Latin fluere, to flow. German says fliessend, “flowing”.
3. A German vacuum cleaner is a Staubsauger, literally a “dust sucker”.
4. German speakers say Dings for “thingy”; Malayalis say സാധനം (sadhanam), from Sanskrit saadhana, a means or tool.
5. Many formal English words, such as receive, came through French and Latin, just as many formal Malayalam words came from Sanskrit.

What this means for learners

1. The US Foreign Service Institute groups languages by how long English speakers take to learn them: Hindi is a Category III language, and Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean are Category IV.
2. The levels A1 to C2 you see on courses come from the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).
3. Many languages have one form for writing and another for home. Arabic has Modern Standard Arabic on the news and local Arabic at home; Swiss Germans chat in dialect but write standard German. Malayalam has its own gap between formal and spoken Malayalam.
4. Because Malayalam doesn’t change verbs for the person or adjectives for gender, beginners have far less to memorise than they expect.

Go further

See the Malayalam and Tamil word table, compare Malayalam with 36 world languages, read how hard Malayalam is by FSI class, or learn the Hindi–Malayalam shortcuts. When you want to speak it, book a lesson with Reshmi.