Malayalam is one of the Dravidian languages and as such has an agglutinative grammar. The word order is generally subject–object–verb, although other orders are often employed for reasons such as emphasis. Nouns are inflected for case and number, whilst verbs are conjugated for tense, mood and causativity (and also in archaic language for person, gender, number and polarity). Malayalam adjectives, adverbs, postpositions and conjunctions do not undergo any inflection; they are invariant.
Nouns
The declensional paradigms for some common nouns and pronouns are given below. As Malayalam is an agglutinative language, it is difficult to delineate the cases strictly and determine how many there are, although seven or eight is the generally accepted number. Alveolar plosives and nasals (although the modern Malayalam script does not distinguish the latter from the dental nasal) are marked with a macron below, following the convention of the National Library at Kolkata romanization.
Pronouns
There are three persons – first, second and third. The first person has three forms – singular, inclusive plural (i.e. speaker, listener, and possibly others) and exclusive plural (i.e. speaker and others, but not the listener). The second person has three forms – singular informal, singular formal and plural. Of these, the singular formal and plural forms are similar. A fourth form ('respectful' or 'official') is sometimes used in certain official documents and announcements.
The third person has eight forms – proximal and distal forms of singular masculine, singular feminine, singular neutral and plural. The masculine and feminine genders are used for humans and anthropomorphised non-humans. Non-living objects, plants and most animals take the neutral gender. The plural form is used for multiple objects of any gender. The plural form can also be used for a single person, either to show respect, or because the gender is unknown or irrelevant.
Cases
Vocative forms are given in parentheses after the nominative, as the only pronominal vocatives that are used are the third person ones, which only occur in compounds.
The mnemonic 'നിപ്രസം ഉപ്രസം ആ' created by combining the first sounds of the case names is used.
Number
The suffix -കൾ (-kaḷ), which changes to -ങ്ങൾ (-ṅṅaḷ) when the nouns ends in -അം (-aṁ), is the most common suffix for denoting plural nouns. It is used by all inanimate nouns, concrete or abstract, and most animate, non-gendered nouns. Two other suffixes, -മാർ (-māṟ) and അർ (-aṟ), are used exclusively by a few animate nouns. All suffixes follow the sandhi (സന്ധി) rules where applicable, and are not used when preceded by numeral adjectives. The following are a few examples.
Other nouns
The following are examples of some of the most common declensional patterns.
Adjectives
Malayalam is thought to have no semantic category for adjectives, and instead relies heavily on using participial relative clauses for modifying nouns. There are two classes of words that typically act as adjectives.
Native roots + a: This includes words such as നല്ല (nalla, good), വലിയ (valiya, big), and ചെറിയ (ceṟiya, short). All such words can be directly used as adjectives, without further modification. The conventional view regarding this category of words is that they typically encode the possession of the property they signify in the participial marker (-a) attached to them, meaning a word such as നല്ല (nalla) would actually mean "having goodness". For instance: ഇതൊരു നല്ല പുസ്തകമാണ് (itoru nalla pustakamāṇŭ), translating to "this is a good book", could be thought to mean "this is a goodness-having book". Note that when used in typical relative clauses, the marker -a can be inflected for tense, but not when used here in an adjectival sense. Borrowed roots + am: This includes words such as സങ്കടം (saṅkaṭaṁ, sadness), സന്തോഷം (santōṣaṁ, happiness), and ഉയരം (uyaraṁ, height/tallness). The -am at the end signifies the word's quality as a noun, which means that to use it as an adjective it has to be modified. This is in the form of -ഉള്ള (uḷḷa), the suffix for the non-finite existential copula. For instance: അവൻ ഉയരമുള്ള കുട്ടിയാണ് (avaṉ uyaramuḷḷa kuṭṭiyāṇŭ, translating to "he is a tall child") could be thought to mean "he is a tallness-having child". Since the suffix is non-finite it does not vary with tense or person.
Verbs
Inflection of Malayalam verbs occurs for tense, aspect, and mode (TAM), and not for number (plurality) or gender. The dictionary form of verbs typically have the ending -ഉക (-uka), although some verbs have the ending ഇക (-ika) too.