Malayalam
A palindrome with a lot of consonants
A Dravidian language that split from Tamil around a thousand years ago and took a great deal of Sanskrit with it.
- The name is a palindrome in Latin letters, which is a coincidence and a good one.
- It broke off from Tamil around the ninth century, and the two are still close but no longer mutually intelligible.
- It has one of the largest sound inventories in India, with distinctions that Tamil merged.
- Words agglutinate freely, so a sentence can arrive as one very long word.
- Kerala, where it is spoken, has the highest literacy rate in India, and a publishing industry to match.
A palindrome in English and a language of hundred-million-letter cinema in Kerala. Agglutinative, with a script of loops that looks like it was drawn in one line. Kerala's backwaters, a communist state with India's best literacy, and a film industry critics rank above Bollywood: all locals-only until you speak.
Where Malayalam parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Malayalam with.
The Malayalam Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.