Malayalam
History

Due to the geographical isolation of the Malabar Coast from the rest of the Indian peninsula due to the presence of the Western Ghats mountain ranges which lie parallel to the coast, the dialect of Old Tamil spoken in Kerala was different from that spoken in Tamil Nadu. The mainstream view holds that Malayalam began to grow as a distinct literary language from the western coastal dialect of Middle Tamil and the linguistic separation completed sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries. The renowned poets of Classical Tamil such as Paranar (1st century CE), Ilango Adigal (2nd–3rd century CE), and Kulasekhara Alvar (9th century CE) were Keralites. The Sangam works can be considered as the ancient predecessor of Malayalam.

Some scholars however believe that both Tamil and Malayalam developed during the prehistoric period from a common ancestor, "Proto-Tamil-Malayalam", and that the notion of Malayalam being a "daughter" of Tamil is misplaced. This is based on the fact that Malayalam and several Dravidian languages on the Western Coast have common archaic features which are not found even in the oldest historical forms of literary Tamil. Despite this, Malayalam shares many common innovations with Tamil that emerged during the early Middle Tamil period, thus making independent descent impossible. For example, Old Tamil lacks the first and second person plural pronouns with the ending kaḷ. It is in the Early Middle Tamil stage that kaḷ first appears:

Indeed, most features of Malayalam morphology are derivable from a form of speech corresponding to early Middle Tamil.

Robert Caldwell, in his 1856 book " A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages", opined that literary Malayalam branched from Classical Tamil and over time gained a large amount of Sanskrit vocabulary and lost the personal terminations of verbs. As the language of scholarship and administration, Old-Tamil, which was written in Tamil-Brahmi and the Vatteluttu alphabet later, greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam as a literary language. The Malayalam script began to diverge from the Vatteluttu and the Western Grantha scripts in the 8th and 9th centuries of Common Era. By the end of the 13th century, a written form of the language emerged which was unique from the Vatteluttu script that was used to write Tamil on the eastern coast.
punctuation:no_comma