Where Malayalam sits in its family, who its relatives are, and what you get free if you ever study another one. Malayalam belongs to the Dravidian family: around twenty-six languages, depending how you count, and roughly a quarter of a billion speakers. Four have long literary traditions and official status — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Key Malayalam words for this topic: ഭാഷ (bhaasha) – language ഭാഷാകുടുംബം (bhaashaakudumbam) – language family ദ്രാവിഡം (draavidam) – Dravidian തമിഴ് (thamizh) – Tamil തെലുങ്ക് (thelunku) – Telugu കന്നഡ (kannada) – Kannada തുളു (thulu) – Tulu വാക്ക് (vaakku) – word വ്യാകരണം (vyaakaranam) – grammar ക്രിയ (kriya) – verb I am Dr. Reshmi R. Nair, an applied linguist from Kerala. I have taught hundreds of learners to speak Malayalam as it is actually spoken. THE BRANCHES SOUTH DRAVIDIAN — Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and also Tulu around Mangalore, Kodava in Coorg, and the small languages of the Nilgiri hills: Toda, Kota, Irula, Badaga. SOUTH-CENTRAL — Telugu, the largest by speakers, with Gondi and others. CENTRAL — several smaller languages of central India. NORTH DRAVIDIAN — which contains the fact that makes this family interesting to everyone. THE OUTLIER Brahui is a Dravidian language, and it is spoken in Balochistan, in Pakistan — roughly two thousand kilometres from the nearest other Dravidian speech, with the entire Indo-Aryan north in between. Whatever the explanation, it is a genuine puzzle sitting inside an otherwise tidy map. WHAT THIS BUYS YOU AS A LEARNER The family shares its architecture: verb-final word order, agglutinating suffixes, postpositions rather than prepositions, the inclusive and exclusive "we", and a retroflex series. Learn how Malayalam is BUILT and a great deal of Tamil, Kannada and Telugu grammar is already familiar — the vocabulary changes, the machinery does not. Do you speak another Dravidian language? Which piece of Malayalam felt familiar first? #LearnMalayalam #Malayalam #Kerala