Malayalam Alphabet Table

A chillu is a consonant that ends a syllable as a pure consonant - no built-in a - written as its own letter rather than as base-letter-plus-virama. Malayalam words love final nasals and laterals (avaṉ 'he', avaḷ 'she', oṭuvil 'finally'), and the chillu writes those endings compactly. Historically each chillu was just a glyph variant of its base letter rendered word-finally; Unicode 5.0 treated it that way, which made old text behave unpredictably when fonts disagreed. Unicode 5.1 (2008) promoted the six common chillus to independent code points (U+0D7A..0D7F), and Unicode 9.0 (2016) added the three rare ones - the only Brahmic script that got a letter upgrade in living memory.

Visual order and logical order disagree for the e-series. The signs for e, ē and ai are placed to the left of the consonant letter even though the vowel comes after it in speech, and the o/ō wrap sign splits around the letter on both sides. In കേരളം (Kēraḷam, 'Kerala') the േ sign is the leftmost thing on the line but is pronounced in the middle of the word. Fonts and shaping engines have to implement this reordering; it is the same class of complexity as Telugu's two-piece o-wrap, and it is why Malayalam text is unusually sensitive to bad font fallbacks.

Candrakkala is Malayalam's virama (the vowel-killer every Indic script has), but Malayalam gave it a second life: placed where a vowel would be illegal or odd, it writes samvruthokaram - a reduced, half-pronounced u (ə̆) rather than a full vowel or a pure consonant. So അവൻ reads avaṉ with a plain final n, while a candrakkala in പക്‍ഷ-type contexts or before certain endings gives the half-u that grammar books list as a separate sound. Most charts mention only the killing function; learners who miss the half-u hear Malayalam 'swallow' syllables that are actually written.

They are siblings that split around the 9th century, and modern spoken Tamil and Malayalam share deep grammar - but the scripts diverged in the opposite direction from what you might guess. Tamil pruned: no voiced stops, no aspirates, a minimal Grantha set, conjuncts split with a dot. Malayalam kept the full Sanskrit inventory: all five varga rows complete with aspirates, three sibilants (ശ ഷ സ) where Tamil merged them, and the Grantha letters it absorbed along with centuries of Sanskrit (Mani-pravalam) literacy. The chillu system is the shared inheritance - Tamil's ர்-style finals and Malayalam chillus are cousins - but only Malayalam gave them Unicode code points of their own.

The same palm-leaf physics that shaped Tamil and the southern scripts, taken further. Malayalam was carved and written on palm leaf, where straight lines tear along the grain, so curves became the house style - and because the script kept so many more letters than its neighbors, each letter was compressed into a smaller, rounder cell to fit the same line. Layered on top: dense conjunct stacking, chillus reduced from their base letters, and vowel signs that wrap around consonants on both sides. The result is the most continuously curved of India's major scripts - and, like Telugu, a rendering-stress-test for text engines.