In India, Malayalam has wide acceptance amongst the people of Kerala state where it has gained the status of the official language, thus enabling it to become one of the twenty-three Indian official languages. As per a survey conducted in the year 1997, there are 35,351,000 Malayalam speakers in the Indian subcontinent. Worldwide, Malayam speakers have been estimated as 35,757,100. Quite a lot of people can identify Malayalam in different names like Mopla ,Alealum, Malayalani, Malayali, Malean, Maliyad, Mallealle.

The Malayalam language is a part of the famous language family, namely Dravidian. It also has a close link with Tamil, another language in India. 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. Later the influx of " Namboothiris" 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.

Multiple dialects are found that have branched out from this beautiful Malayalam language. Malabar, Nagari-Malayalam, Malayalam, South Kerala, Central Kerala, North Kerala, Kayavar, Namboodiri, Moplah, Pulaya, Nasrani, Nayar are some of them. Few dialects are widely spoken by special communities and castes like Muslims, Christians, Jews, Jainas and Hindus . These include Namboodiri, Nayar, Moplah, Pulaya, Nasrani

Bishop Robert Caldwell, a famous personality, has put forward another opinion. In his Comparative Grammar of Dravidian Languages (1875), he asserted that Malayalam evolved out of Tamil in the initial five centuries A.D. 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 civilization and languages reaching its zenith.