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Is Malayalam a mixture of Tamil and Sanskrit?

Malayalam is the daughter of Tamil, and Sanskrit has become more of a cliché. Can one get Tamil if Sanskrit is eliminated from Malayalam? Or vice versa? This is an inquiry into the subject of whether Malayalam has its own identity or not.

Language and Dialect

Is the Malayalam language a dialect of Tamil? Before answering that question, one needs to understand the distinction between language and a language dialect. A dialect is a regional variant of a language. A macaronic language is an inter-mix of two or more languages, and this usually exists in the literature. However, linguistics does not specify a clear line between language and dialect. It’s a vague definition. For instance, in Europe, the rise of ‘Nation States’ established a political meaning to the term dialect. These nation-states have a standardised language as their national language, and a standardised language is a language dialect having political importance. Other dialects are suppressed or undignified.

A similar scenario exists in India as well. Hindi and its so-called dialects are the biggest examples of this. Many languages in the Hindi belt are defined as ‘Dialects of Hindi’. Even though they don’t have any direct connection with the Hindi language and the fact that some of these languages which are purposefully identified as dialects tend to be older than Hindi. Hence, Hindi has original dialects and political dialects. The latter is an irrational classification.

When asked how a language differs from a dialect, famous linguist Max Weinreich gave this reply;

Linguists use the term variant instead of dialect because there is no obvious methodology involved to differentiate between a language and a dialect. Based on this, Malayalam can be classified into Malayalam variants and Standard Malayalam. The Malayalam language can be seen as a single unit containing all the regional variants from Kasargod to Kanyakumari. This is also because these regional variants didn’t evolve from Standard Malayalam, and these variants are older than the standardised version of the language. Provided below are two images of the dialect gradient of the Malayalam language.

Sanskrit Malayalam and Manipravalam

Manipravalam literature indicates the direct contact between Sanskrit and Malayalam languages. Even before that, Malayalam had Sanskrit loan words, but the language had no significant influence over Malayalam. The Malayalam word for ‘thousand’ - āyiram is a great example of this early adoption, although it was indirect. The Sanskrit language also took loan words from other languages. However, these early loans integrated into the Malayalam language by accepting its native phonological rules.

The Vernacular language of Kerala, Malayalam mixed with Sanskrit, which was primarily used by the Namboothiri migrants to form a new poetic school known as Manipravalam. Often Manipravalam is mistaken for the Malayalam language, and this encourages the narrative of Malayalam being the daughter of Sanskrit.

Like Manipravalam, there are many mixed languages ​​in Kerala which are a combination of Malayalam and other languages. Arabi-Malayalam and Suriyani are notable macaronic languages of Kerala. Dravidian languages have a specific kind of structure, which mostly remains unchanged even with the undue influence of other languages. These languages can incorporate a plethora of loan words from other languages into their vocabulary at the same time preserving their rudimentary structure. Brahui is the biggest example of this, Dravidian vocabulary in this language only constitutes to around 15%, yet it retains all the characteristics of a Dravidian language.

This structural preservation facilitates the easy formation of macaronic languages. Malayalam being in contact with several foreign languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic, and Syriac paved the way for intermixing and thus the birth of these literary treasures of Kerala.

Another misinformation about Manipravalam literature is its origin being regarded as Tamil. The term Mani represents the Malayalam language, and Pravalam (coral) denotes Sanskrit.

“kālāhinā parigrastamāṁ lōkavuṁ ālōla cētasā bhōgaṅṅaḷ tēṭunnu” -

Above is a line from the great poet Thunchath Ezhuthachan’s Ramayanam Kilipattu. Most of the words in the above line are Sanskrit words. Loan words need to agree with the phonological and grammatical rules of the Tamil language. The above line falls contrary to such rules in the Tamil language. The last word in this line, tēṭunnu doesn’t fit with Tamil rules or isn’t even a Tamil usage. It is a Malayalam usage. The Sanskrit word “bhōgaṁ” is subjected to pluralisation here, and “-ṅṅaḷ” is the particle used for that purpose. In Tamil gemination of “ṅa” is rare and “-ṅṅaḷ” never is a particle of pluralisation in Tamil. This however agrees to the phonological rules of the Malayalam language.

Language relations

Malayalam and Sanskrit belong to two different language families. Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gondi, Irula etc. are classified as Dravidian languages. Dravidian languages are chiefly spoken in South India and are scattered across Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Sanskrit is a member of the largest language family on Earth, the Indo-European language family. Languages like Latin, German, Spanish, English, Russian, French, Persian, Hindi etc. belongs to this family. Sanskrit is classified as an Indo-Aryan language, which is a sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. The Dravidian language family and Indo-European language family are not related to each other.

All Dravidian languages are agglutinative in structure, this feature is found in languages such as Japanese, Finnish, and Korean. Meanwhile, Indo-Aryan languages are Fusional languages.

Agglutination

Agglutination is one of the fundamental factors that separate Dravidian languages from Indo-Aryan languages. The word agglutination is derived from the Latin verb agglutinare, which means “to glue together”. In Malayalam, one can see that grammatical component such as number, gender, case marker, tenses etc. are attached to the end of a word.

Let’s take the Malayalam word kai (hand) as an example.

‌eḻutu - to write , eḻutu + i = eḻuti - wrote (past tense), eḻutu + um = eḻutum - will write (future), Here grammatical cases are attached to the root eḻutu to form different meanings.

In the case of a fusional language like Sanskrit, a single inflectional morpheme is used to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic and semantic features.

Comparison

English - Malayalam - Finnish

fear - pēṭi - pelko
I fear - ñān pēṭikkunnu - pelkään
I will fear - ñān pēṭikkum - minä pelkään
I feared - ñān pēṭiccu - minä pelkäsin
I am fearless - enikku pēṭiyilla - olen peloton

English - Hindi

fear - dar
I fear - mujhe dar hai
I will fear - mujhe dar lagega
I feared - mujhe dar tha
I am fearless - main nidar hoon

One can see that how the structure of Dravidian and Fusional languages compare to each other. Malayalam and Finnish attaches -kunnu -än, -ccu -äsin, and -illa -ton to the roots pēṭi and pelko.

In addition to that, native Malayalam words do not use prefixes, these are only found in Sanskrit loan words. Dravidian languages prefer suffixes to prefixes. Negations such as -a and -na/-ni are attached to Sanskrit loan words; nir-bhayam fearless, a-nīti unjust. Meanwhile, Pure Malayalam words make use of suffixes such as -illa/-alla (pēṭi+illa - pēṭiyilla) fearless , -aṯṯa (uyir + aṯṯa - uyiraṯṯa) lifeless, and -ā (kāṇ + ā) not visible, to show negation.

Just because words are borrowed does not mean that one language evolved from another. After Sanskrit, Malayalam borrows most words from English. This doesn’t make Malayalam the daughter of the English language. The Sanskrit origin theory was quashed by linguists long ago, but it still prevails as one of the greatest misinformation about Indian languages. Chattambiswamikal’s Adibhasha, and Dravida Mahathmyam are two notable works in the field of Dravidian linguistics which annuls the Sanskrit origin theory with grammar and literature.

Comparison of numbers

Dravidian

1. Malayalam - onn raṇṭ mūnn nāl añc āṟ ēḻ eṭṭ ompat patt nūṟ āyiram
2. Tamil - onṟu iraṇṭu mūnṟu nānku aintu āṟu ēḻu eṭṭu onpatu pattu nūṟu āyiram
3. Kannada - ondu eraḍu mūru nālku aidu āru ēḷu eṇṭu oṁbattu hattu nūru sāvira
4. Telugu - okaṭi rēṇḍu mūḍu nālugu aidu aru ēḍu enimidi tommidi padi vanda veyyi
5. Tulu - oñji raḍḍu mūji nāl ain āji ēḷ eṇma ormba patt nūdu sāra

Indo-European

1. Greek - ena dyo triya tessera penṟe eksi epta okto enneya dekka ekkāto

2. Latin - unum duo tres kvāttuor kviyinkve seks septem oktinjenṟi nonjenṟi ḍecem kentum

3. Sanskrit - ēkaṁ dvi tri catuḥ pañca ṣaṭh sapta aṣṭha nava daśa śata sahasra

4. Hindi - ēk dō tīn cār pāñc chah sāt āṭh nau das sau

5. Spanish - uno dos tres kvātro cinko seyis siyatte occo nuyeve diyes sentenār

6. Romanian - unu doyi treyi patru cinci sase sapte opt naua sece suta

Comparative Analysis of Sanskrit and Malayalam

1. s. kiṁ prati vadati sā ?
   m. avaḷ /avar entinekkuṟiccāṇ paṟayunnat ? What is she talking about?

2. s. mama vacanaṁ śr̥ṇōtu
   m. ñān paṟayunnat kēḷkku Listen to me

3. s. kiṁ dr̥ṣṭavān ?
   m. tāṅkaḷ entāṇ kaṇṭat? What did you see?

4. s. ēkākinī parvataṁ ārōḍhuṁ sā niścayaṁ kr̥tavatī
   m. avaḷ oṟṟaykku mala kayaṟān tīrumāniccu. She decided to climb the mountain alone.

5. s. rāmaḥ taṁ tāḍayituṁ hastaṁ unnītavān
   m. rāman avane aṭikkuvānāyi kayyōṅṅi Raman raised his hand to hit him.

All Sanskrit nouns have gender assigned to them. For instance, agni (fire) is masculine , phala (fruit) is neutral, nadi (river) is feminine. Dravidian languages does not have a similar classification.

In Tholkappiyam (The earliest grammar thesis on a Dravidian language : Tamil) nouns are broadly classified into two; rational and irrational.

uyarttiṇai* words are nouns that show human characteristics or are rational. **akṟiṇai** includes irrational beings (animals, birds), things like trees, and abiotic things (river, land). Humans and Deities fall under the first classification, and the rest are Akrinai. Further, gender in Uyrittinai is classified into three main divisions in South Dravidian languages; Masculine, feminine, neutral/plural. Deities and neutral gender/other genders fall under the neutral/plural division. Gender is not assigned to nouns that fall under Akrinai (irrational category).

The Sanskrit grammar is much more comprehensive than Malayalam grammar, and unlike Sanskrit, Malayalam does not assign gender to fruits, trees or rivers. The basic structure of these two language families is quite distant from each other, even though they have influenced each other over thousands of years.

Reference

• The Study of Language, George Yule, Fourth Edition
• The Dravidian Languages, Bhadriraju Krishnamurthi
• A Grammar of Malayalim, Rev. George Matthan
• Tholkappiyam in English, Dr. V. Murugan, 2000
• Sanskrit for Beginners, A simple and comprehensive guide

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