Another variant form, Malayanma, was used in the south of Thiruvananthapuram. A variant form of this script, Kolezhuthu, was used until about the 19th century mainly in the Kochi area and in the Malabar area. In the Tamil country, the modern Tamil script had supplanted Vattezhuthu by the 15th century, but in the Malabar region, Vattezhuthu remained in general use up to the 17th century, or the 18th century. The Vazhappally inscription issued by Rajashekhara Varman is the earliest example, dating from about 830 CE. Malayalam was first written in Vattezhuthu. Vattezhuthu (Malayalam: വട്ടെഴുത്ത്, Vaṭṭezhuthŭ ?, “round writing”) is a script that had evolved from Tamil-Brahmi and was once used extensively in the southern part of present-day Tamil Nadu and in Kerala. Both Vatteluttu and Grantha evolved from the Tamil-Brahmi, but independently. However, the modern Malayalam script evolved from the Grantha alphabet, which was originally used to write Sanskrit. Malayalam was first written in the Vatteluttu alphabet, an ancient script of Tamil. In the word കേരളം ( Kēraḷam), the vowel sign േ ( ē) visually appears in the leftmost position, though the vowel ē logically follows the consonant k.
It is written from left to right, but certain vowel signs are attached to the left (the opposite direction) of a consonant letter that it logically follows. Malayalam alphabet is unicase, or does not have a case distinction. ക ka = consonant letter ക ka itself, with no vowel sign.The following are examples where a consonant letter is used with or without a diacritic. To denote a pure consonant sound not followed by a vowel, a special diacritic virama is used to cancel the inherent vowel. In Malayalam, its phonetic value is unrounded, or as an allophone. The phoneme /a/ that follows a consonant by default is called an inherent vowel. If the following vowel is /a/, no vowel sign is needed.
A vowel sign is a diacritic attached to a consonant letter to indicate that the consonant is followed by a vowel other than /a/. For example, ക is the first consonant letter of the Malayalam alphabet, which represents /ka/, not a simple /k/. A consonant letter, despite its name, does not represent a pure consonant, but represents a consonant + a short vowel /a/ by default.
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