As Malayalam is an agglutinative language, it is difficult to delineate the cases strictly and determine how many there are, although seven or eight is the generally accepted number. The declensional paradigms for some common nouns and pronouns are given below. Malayalam adjectives, adverbs, postpositions and conjunctions do not undergo any inflection they are invariant.
Nouns are inflected for case and number, whilst verbs are conjugated for tense, mood and causativity (and also in archaic language for person, gender, number and polarity). The word order is generally subject–object–verb, although other orders are often employed for reasons such as emphasis. Malayalam is one of the Dravidian languages and as such has an agglutinative grammar.
