Writing Malayalam in Roman Script: Manglish, Digital Orthography and Linguistic Identity in Kerala

Abstract

Much everyday written Malayalam on phones and social media is no longer written in the Malayalam script but in Roman letters, a practice widely known as "Manglish." Public debate in Kerala often treats Manglish as a sign of declining script literacy and of English eroding the mother tongue. This paper argues instead that Manglish is best understood as an informal, user-created orthography with its own conventions and social meanings. Drawing on research that treats orthography as social practice (Florian Coulmas, Mark Sebba), digital writing as vernacular literacy (David Crystal, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Jan Blommaert) and code-mixing as a normal feature of multilingual communication (Braj Kachru, Carol Myers-Scotton), it analyses the main features of Manglish spelling, including digraphs such as "zh" and "nj," the collapsing of dental and retroflex distinctions, inconsistent and expressive marking of vowel length, and widespread variation. It shows how the Roman script removes the visible boundary between Malayalam and English and so supports fluid code-mixing. The paper also places Manglish within the longer history of Malayalam written in several scripts, including Arabi-Malayalam, Suriyani Malayalam and the reformed script of 1971. It considers why Manglish has spread, among young people and the Gulf diaspora in particular, and concludes with implications for language education, language technology and debates about linguistic identity in Kerala.