Quantitative Analysis of the Morphological Complexity of Malayalam Language.

This paper presents a quantitative analysis on the morphological complexity of Malayalam language. Malayalam is a Dravidian language spoken in India, predominantly in the state of Kerala with about 38 million native speakers. Malayalam words undergo inflections, derivations and compounding leading to an infinitely extending lexicon. In this work, morphological complexity of Malayalam is quantitatively analyzed on a text corpus containing 8 million words. The analysis is based on the parameters type-token growth rate (TTGR), type-token ratio (TTR) and moving average type-token ratio (MATTR). The values of the parameters obtained in the current study is compared to that of the values of other morphologically complex languages.