Sinhala
Language · official in 1 country
Sinhala takes its name from siṁha, the Sanskrit word for lion, and its inscriptions go back to the 3rd century BCE. It is an Indo-Aryan language written in its own Brahmic script, the Sinhala hodiya, and split between a literary and a spoken form. It is a national language of Sri Lanka along with Tamil.
The language on record
- Own name
- සිංහල
- ISO 639-1
- SI
- ISO 639-3
- SIN
- Script
- Sinhala
- Family
- Indo-Aryan
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Sinhala is official
Sri Lanka is the only country on record for Sinhala, and there Tamil holds the same national status beside it.
Official beside Sinhala
About Sinhala
How an Indo-Aryan language reached Sri Lanka
The earliest inscriptions are in a Prakrit close to Magadhi, the Middle Indian speech of the Buddha's time, and still keep long vowels and aspirated consonants. The Pali chronicle Mahāvaṃsa tells of Prince Vijaya of the Vanga Kingdom settling on the island, and later migration from eastern India brought features of the Eastern Prakrits. Linguists divide the history into four stages: Elu Prakrit to the 4th century CE, Proto-Sinhala to the 8th, Medieval Sinhala to the 13th, and Modern Sinhala since.
Its closest relatives are the Maldivian languages and Vedda, an endangered creole that mixes Sinhala with an isolate of unknown origin.
What Dravidian contact changed
Sinhala lost the aspirated stops and the old vowel length of its Indo-Aryan ancestors, and its syntax branches consistently to the left. Both traits are put down to a South Dravidian substratum and a long period of bilingualism. Tamil lent many words besides, and about three centuries of colonial rule added Portuguese, Dutch and English ones.
Why written Sinhala differs from speech
Sinhala is a textbook case of diglossia. The literary language is used for prose, poetry, official documents and broadcast news; the spoken one covers everyday life. The sharpest test is agreement: literary Sinhala makes the verb agree with its subject and spoken Sinhala never does. Sermons, lectures and speeches sit in between and mix the two.
The script is written from left to right and is also used for Pali and Sanskrit, the liturgical languages of Theravada Buddhism, whose literature Sinhala helped to shape.
Common questions
Questions about Sinhala
Is Sinhala the same as Sinhalese?
Yes. Sinhalese is another English name for the language, and it is also the name of the people who speak it as a first language.
What script is Sinhala written in?
Its own, the Sinhala script, a Brahmic script descended from ancient Brahmi and close to Grantha and Khmer, with elements taken from Kadamba.
How is literary Sinhala different from spoken Sinhala?
They use two separate systems of syntax and morphology. Literary Sinhala has subject and verb agreement, needs the copula venavā in equational sentences and keeps the accusative and locative cases; colloquial speech drops all three.