AbstractRecent researches regarding information hiding is mostly concentrating on Linguistic steganography. In this paper, a method to steganography is proposed with an Indian local language, Malayalam. The proposed method consists of custom Unicode based technique with embedding based on indexing, i.e. the original message is encoded to Malayalam text with custom UNICODE values generated for the Malayalam text. The comparison study of the proposed method against an existing method revealed that, the proposed steganography methods is more precise in the encoding process and in the decoding process. The method achieved a precision rate of .95 and decoding rate of .81.