Malayalam and Core Dravidian Phonology

Abstract

Abstract Children’s productions, whether they are identical to or deviate from target adult productions, are revelatory of both the grammatical processes that govern early grammars and those that underlie the target grammars. Malayalam is a Dravidian language, but its vocabulary has many loanwords, especially from Sanskrit. This makes phonological and lexical learning potentially challenging to young learners but also offers a way to uncover the relationships between child and adult phonologies. This chapter discusses the salient segmental and syllable-structure properties of the core phonology of Malayalam and provides a detailed analysis of the spontaneous productions at similar ages of monolingual, Malayalam acquiring children, and bilingual, Malayalam and English acquiring children, with the two-fold aims of discovering the target properties that are manifested in the developing phonology, and recovering what the child phonologies reveal in turn about the core phonology.