Sinhala (language)

Sinhala (language) or Sinhalese (language), official language of Sri Lanka, spoken by Sinhala people. It is a member of the Indo–Iranian family of languages. At present, the number of native Sinhala speakers is over 13 million. Thousands of expatriate Sinhala living abroad speak it as their second language and there are possibly over one million second-language speakers in total, particularly in Canada, Singapore, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates.

The origin of Sinhala is controversial, as the language bears features common to both eastern and western Indian dialects of the 6th century bc. Some scholars argue that Sinhala is related to the Dravidian family of languages, as it was influenced greatly by Tamil and therefore has many similarities with a Dravidian language. With the introduction of Buddhism in the 3rd century bc, Sinhala developed rapidly under the influence of the Pali language. The Mahavamsa, a Buddhist chronicle, records that Buddhist texts and commentaries were translated into Sinhala under the guidance of Mahinda, the first Buddhist missionary of Sri Lanka.

From earliest times Sinhala has developed a rich literature. Books were written in both prose and verse on many subjects. However, while there are only three extant texts from the Anuradhapura period (c. 200 bc to ad 1200), many literary and exegetical works produced in Sinhala during the 11th to 13th centuries ad have survived.

The Sinhala language is of subject-verb-object order and is enriched with borrowed words from Pali, Sanskrit, and Tamil, as well as (through colonial rule) Portuguese, Dutch, and English. In modern colloquial Sinhala, there are hundreds of borrowed words from English. Sinhala is known as a highly poetical and lyrical language. A special feature of the language is the marked distinction between spoken and written Sinhala, for instance, case agreement between the subject and verb is marked in the written language.

Although it has maintained close links with Indian languages, Sinhala has developed some unique features as well. One of them is the vowel represented as “æ”, which is similar to the initial vowel sound in the English word and. This vowel has a long sound as well as a short sound. Another unique feature of Sinhala is the lack of a symbol for “f”, as the sound did not exist in the language. In recent times an asterisk, “*”, has been introduced to represent this sound in borrowed words.

The Sinhala script in the early period was similar to the Brahmi script of the Ashokan inscriptions. Through the centuries, this script has evolved, first under the influence of the Pallava script from the 9th century ad. From there it took on a circular shape, developing further into the Sinhala script used today, which is a syllabic system (see Writing).