Malayalam is classified as a South Dravidian language. This language is one of the 22 scheduled languages of the country being the official language of Kerala. There are at least five main regional dialects of Malayalam language and a number of communal dialects. There are 37 consonants and 16 vowels in the script. Malayalam language differs from other Dravidian language because of the absence of personal endings on verbs. It has a one to one correspondence with the Indo Aryan Devanagari syllabary. For write-ups, Malayalam has a unique script, which covers all the symbols of Sanskrit language and also some of the specific letters of Dravidian languages. The script used is called Kolezhethu (Rod-script) which is derived from ancient Grandha Script.

Later the influx of Namboodiris into cultural life of Keralites, the trade relationships with foreign countries and also the Portuguese incursion to Kerala sped up the incorporation of many more Indo-Aryan languages into Malayalam language. In the early centuries it used a form called the vattezhuthu which had currency all over the regions of the Cheras and the Pandyas. It disappeared from the rest of the peninsula by about the fifteenth century, but in Kerala it continued to be in use for three more centuries. From vattezhuthu was derived the kolezhuthu script. There is no fundamental difference between the two scripts. Kolezhuthu script was more commonly used in the Cochin and Malabar areas than in Travancore. Yet another script derived from the vattezhuthu was the Malayanma, which was in common use to the south of Thiruvananthapuram. Malayanma also does not differ fundamentally from vattezhuthu script.

Multiple dialects are found that have branched out from Malayalam language. Malabar, Nagari-Malayalam, Malayalam, South Kerala, Central Kerala, North Kerala, Kayavar, Namboodiri, Moplah, Pulaya, Nasrani, Nayar are some of them. Bishop Robert Caldwell, a famous personality, has put forward another opinion. In his Comparative Grammar of Dravidian Languages (1875), he asserted that Malayalam language evolved out of Tamil kanguage. This period is famous as the Sangam period and at that time; Kerala was integrated to a huge portion of the political segment, better known as Tamilakam, with the Dravidian civilisation and languages reaching its zenith.