World Language Map

Where is Malayalam spoken?

Malayalam (مَلَیٰاۻَمْ) is a Dravidian language, spoken in India, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Bahrain and 2 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Malayalam is spoken

Malayalam is spoken in 6 countries: India, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Bahrain and 2 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
India3.2%45,092,160
United Arab Emirates7%702,254
Malaysia0.2%51,847
Bahrain3.3%51,707
Singapore0.2%10,248
Qatar0.3%6,380

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Malayalam is drawn as an area from Steever 2019 (Dravidian). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643727), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Malayalam.

How many people speak Malayalam?

Wikidata gives about 37.1 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Malayalam sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Malayalam as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Dravidian
  2. South Dravidian
  3. South Dravidian I
  4. Tamil-Kannada
  5. Tamil-Kota
  6. Tamil-Toda
  7. Tamil-Irula
  8. Tamil-Kodagu
  9. Tamil-Malayalam
  10. Malayalamoid
  11. Malayalam

Related languages

Other languages in the Malayalamoid group (a selection):

More about Malayalam

Codes: ISO 639-3 mal, Glottolog mala1464. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Malayalam

Where is Malayalam spoken?

Malayalam is spoken in India, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Bahrain and 2 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 3.2% of the population of India, which is about 45,092,160 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Steever 2019 (Dravidian).

How many people speak Malayalam?

Wikidata gives about 37.1 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Malayalam in?

Glottolog places Malayalam in the Dravidian family, in the branch South Dravidian, South Dravidian I, Tamil-Kannada, Tamil-Kota, Tamil-Toda, Tamil-Irula, Tamil-Kodagu, Tamil-Malayalam and Malayalamoid.

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