Which Class 4 language is most like Malayalam?

Japanese — it shares 10 of Malayalam's ten core grammatical features.

How long does FSI say a Class 4 language takes?

88 weeks · 2,200 hours of study for an English speaker to reach professional working proficiency. Exceptionally difficult languages for English speakers.

Is Malayalam on the FSI difficulty list?

Malayalam is not published on the FSI's public category list. On every reasonable reading it sits with Tamil in the 44-week, 1,100-hour tier — same family, same script type, same grammatical architecture.

FSI Class 4 · 88 weeks · 2,200 hours

Malayalam and the Class 4 languages

Exceptionally difficult languages for English speakers — and how much of Malayalam's grammar each one already gives you.

Home › Resources › Class 4 languages

Class 4 — 88 weeks · 2,200 hours. Exceptionally difficult languages for English speakers, according to the US Foreign Service Institute's published difficulty categories. The punchline of the whole exercise. The five languages the US government considers hardest for English speakers include the closest structural relative Malayalam has outside Dravidian — Japanese, at a perfect ten.

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.

Japanese 10 / 10

A perfect ten, with no historical connection to Kerala whatsoever. desu is aanu; ka is -o; suru is cheyyuka; -tara is -aal; the small っ is Malayalam's twin consonant.

Korean 9 / 10

Nine of ten. -ida parallels aanu, -myeon parallels enkil, and Korean kinship is as precise as Malayalam's.

Mandarin Chinese 4 / 10

Prenominal relative clauses with 的 work like Malayalam's relative participle, and its retroflex series is made the same way.

Cantonese 4 / 10

As Mandarin: prenominal relatives and final question particles.

Arabic 3.5 / 10

Ferguson's classic diglossia case — the closest parallel anywhere to Malayalam's own written/spoken split.

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
Japanese	full match	full match	full match	full match	full match	full match	full match	full match	full match	full match	10
Korean	full match	full match	full match	full match	full match	partial	full match	full match	partial	full match	9
Mandarin Chinese	absent	partial	absent	absent	full match	absent	full match	full match	absent	partial	4
Cantonese	absent	partial	absent	absent	full match	absent	full match	full match	absent	partial	4
Arabic	absent	absent	absent	partial	full match	absent	absent	partial	full match	partial	3.5

See the full four-class comparison for the pattern across all of them — or the interactive atlas to score your own language.

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