Malayalam Script

An abugida used to write Malayalam, developed in Kerala from the Vatteluttu script with heavy borrowing from Grantha to represent Sanskrit loanwords, a blend historians date to roughly the ninth century CE. Its very large character inventory, one of the biggest of any Brahmic script once conjunct consonant ligatures are counted, reflects that dual ancestry: native Dravidian sounds carried through Vatteluttu and Sanskrit sounds carried through Grantha. A 1970s-80s script reform simplified many of its most complex ligatures for typewriters and, later, digital text, though the older forms remain in older printed material and some formal contexts.