English to Malayalam Typing

Malayalam closes a great many words with a chillu — a standalone consonant form with no following vowel: ൻ ർ ൽ ൾ ൺ. Getting them right is the usual stumbling block when typing Malayalam, because the wrong choice is a bare consonant plus a virama, which looks nearly the same and is not the same string.

This tool converts them as part of rendering the word. Type avan and you get അവൻ; type aval and you get അവൽ. You do not have to know that a chillu was involved.

Malayalam is strongly agglutinative, and sandhi joins words in writing that you would separate when speaking. So a conversion that produces one alarmingly long word is frequently right — it is what the language does, not the tool running away with itself.

Where it does err is the join itself: fusing two words that should stay apart, or splitting a legitimate compound. That makes the common correction a spacing edit, which is quick once you expect it.

The engine is rule-based with a small dictionary of common words. Greetings and everyday vocabulary convert exactly — nandi gives നന്ദി. Beyond that it works from rules, and the one thing rules cannot infer is vowel length.

Writing long vowels doubled — aa, ee, oo — fixes most of what would otherwise come out short. For a letter you cannot get any other way, the Malayalam keyboard has the alphabet on screen, with the chillu forms alongside it.