Malayalam is a language of the Dravidian family. It is very close to Tamil, one of the major languages of the same family. This was due to the extensive cultural synthesis that took place between the speakers of the two languages.

Tamil, in Kerala, was for long, the language of administration. This has resulted in Tamil being used in literature too. In addition, Malayalam was influenced by Sanskrit also. Malayalam absorbed a lot from Sanskrit, not only in the lexical level, but also in the phonemic, morphemic and grammatical levels of language. Looking back, we see that early Malayalam literature consists of three streams namely,

(1) Folk Literature

(2) Early Tamil Literature

(3) Manipravalam Literature