WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Malayalam
Malayalam gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, where the character count is not the key count: 36 distinct characters appear across 24 practice words. Malayalam is typed on the Malayalam InScript layout.
One of the larger Indic character inventories, historically including several hundred ligature forms for consonant clusters. A 1971 reform introduced simplified shapes, partly to fit typewriters and early printing; the traditional forms never disappeared and digital typography has made them practical again, so contemporary text mixes both. Malayalam also forms very long compound words, which makes word counts and character counts tell different stories.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 36 distinct characters across 24 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Malayalam keyboard layout
- Malayalam InScript
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 22 of the 36 characters its practice words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ്11
- വ9
- ി8
- ം5
- ക4
- ത4
- യ4
- ല4
- അ3
- ട3
The longest practice word in this script is വളരെ in Malayalam.
The one language written in Malayalam
Other writing systems
- Myanmar A rounded abugida written without spaces between words, whose recent history is dominated by an encoding problem rather than a linguistic one.
- Odia Distinguished by the curved line running across the top of most letters — an adaptation, like Sinhala's rounded shapes, usually attributed to writing on palm leaves, where a straight horizontal stroke risked tearing along the grain.
- Sinhala Written in rounded letterforms with almost no straight lines at all — the usual explanation being palm-leaf manuscripts, whose grain a straight stroke could split.
There is a written guide for this script: InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts. India's standard keyboard is not one layout but a family. The same key gives the matching letter in Devanagari, Bengali, Telugu and five more.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.