Malayalam and the Class 2 languages
Languages with some linguistic differences from English — and how much of Malayalam's grammar each one already gives you.
Shared grammatical features with Malayalam
Each language scored against the same ten features used throughout this site. A full match counts 1, a partial match 0.5.
The strongest European match. Four cases, verb-final subordinate clauses, du/Sie — and a true dative subject: mir ist kalt is enikku thanuppundu exactly.
Agglutinative affixation and pro-drop, with the question particle -kah.
As Indonesian — suffix-building and dropped subjects.
Builds words by stacking separable affixes exactly as Malayalam does, from an unrelated family on another continent.
Almost no overlap; included for completeness.
Feature by feature
● full match · ◐ partial · ○ absent
| Language | Verb goes last | Postpositions | Suffixes stack | Case endings | Subject dropped | Dative subject | Relative participle | Question by ending | Twin consonants | Respect levels | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German | partial | partial | full match | full match | absent | full match | absent | absent | absent | full match | 5 |
| Indonesian | absent | absent | full match | absent | full match | absent | absent | partial | absent | partial | 3 |
| Malay | absent | absent | full match | absent | full match | absent | absent | partial | absent | partial | 3 |
| Swahili | absent | absent | full match | absent | full match | absent | partial | partial | absent | absent | 3 |
| Haitian Creole | absent | absent | absent | absent | absent | absent | absent | partial | absent | absent | 0.5 |
Learn this properly, with a teacher who wrote the book
Everything on this page is drawn from Speak Malayalam: The Complete Colloquial Course — 3,297 pages, nineteen volumes, built on the spoken language rather than the textbook one. The first thirty days are free.