Sinhala සිංහල siṃhala
Spoken in:	Sri Lanka
Total speakers:	19 million
Language family:	Indo-European  Indo-Iranian   Indo-Aryan    Insular Indo-Aryan     Sinhala
Writing system:	Sinhala abugida (developed from the Brahmi)
Official status
Official language in:	Sri Lanka
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	si
ISO 639-2:	sin
ISO 639-3:	sin
This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More...

Sinhalese or Sinhala (සිංහල, ISO 15919: siṃhala, pronounced [ˈsiŋhələ]], earlier referred to as Singhalese) is the mother tongue of the Sinhalese, the largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common proto-language. ... For other uses, see Indo-European. ... The Indo-Iranian language group constitutes the easternmost extant branch of the Indo-European family of languages. ... The Indo-Aryan languages form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages. ... The Insular Indo-Aryan languages (also known as Sinhalese-Maldivian) include three languages and dialects spoken on the islands of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; this language group is a part of the Indo-Aryan language family. ... Writing systems of the world today. ... The Sinhala script is used to write the Sinhala language. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, descended from the BrāhmÄ« script of Mauryan India. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. ... ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. ... Image File history File links Example. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, descended from the BrāhmÄ« script of Mauryan India. ... A romanization or latinization is a system for representing a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, where the original word or language used a different writing system. ... Language(s) Sinhala Religion(s) Theravada Buddhism, Christianity, small groups of atheists, agnostics, Muslims, others Related ethnic groups Indo-Aryans, Dravidians, Veddahs, Bengalis The Sinhalese are the main ethnic group of Sri Lanka. ... The Indo-Aryan languages form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages. ... For other uses, see Indo-European. ...

Note: Singhalese technically and officially refers to the people and not the language, whereas Sinhala is the proper name for the language. It is important to note that many Sri Lankans will refer to both the people and their respective language as Singhalese so that colloquially and informally Singhalese also refers to the language.

Sinhala is spoken by about 19 million people in Sri Lanka, about 16 million of whom are native speakers. It is one of the constitutionally-recognised official languages of Sri Lanka, along with Tamil. Sinhala has its own writing system (see Sinhala alphabet) which is an offspring of the Brahmi script. Tamil ( ; IPA ) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamils in India and Sri Lanka, with smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. ... Poster in Sinhala script for GCE Advanced Level Political science tuition class in Matale. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas used in South Asia and Southeast Asia. ...

The oldest Sinhala inscriptions were written in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE; the oldest existing literary works date from the 9th century CE.

The closest relative of Sinhala is the language of the Maldives, Dhivehi. Dhivehi or Divehi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 300,000 people in the Republic of Maldives where it is the official language of the country and in the island of Minicoy (Maliku) in neighbouring India where it is known as Mahl. ...

Etymology

Sinhala (actually Sanskrit) and the corresponding Middle Indic term Sīhala have as their first element (siṃha/sīha) the word "lion" in the respective languages. According to legend, Sinhabahu or Sīhabāhu ("Lion-arms"), was the son of a Vanga princess and a lion. He killed his father and became king of Vanga. His son Vijaya would emigrate to Lankā and become the progenitor of the Sinhala people. Taking into account linguistic and mythological evidence, we can assume that the first element of the name of the people means "lion".^[1] Sanskrit ( , for short ) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, and one of the 23 official languages of India. ... The Middle Indo-Aryan (Middle Indic) languages are the medieval dialects of the Indo-Aryan languages, the descendants of the Old Indo-Aryan dialects such as Sanskrit, and the predecessors of the medieval languages such as Apabhramsha or Abahatta, which eventually evolved into the contemporary Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindustani... There are very few or no other articles that link to this one. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... For other uses, see Lion (disambiguation). ... Landing of King Vijaya depicted in an Ajanta fresco Vijaya (c. ... Lanka is the name given in Hindu mythology to the island fortress capital of the evil king Ravana in the epic Ramayana. ...

As for the second element la, local tradition connects it to the Sanskrit root lā- "to seize"^[2], as to translate it "lion-seizer" or "lion-killer", or to Sanskrit loha/Sinhala lē "blood", to have it mean "lion blood". From a linguistic point of view however, neither interpretation is convincing^{[citation needed]}, so that we can only safely say that the word Sinhala is somehow connected to a term meaning "lion".

History

About the 5th century BCE, settlers from North-Western India reached the island of Sri Lanka, bringing with them an Indo-Aryan language. (This first group of settlers is referred to as prince Vijaya and his entourage in the chronicle Mahavamsa.) In the following centuries, there was substantial immigration from North-Eastern India (Kalinga, Magadha) which led to an admixture of features of Eastern Prakrits. (6th century BC - 5th century BC - 4th century BC - other centuries) (2nd millennium BC - 1st millennium BC - 1st millennium AD) Events Demotic becomes the dominant script of ancient Egypt Persians invade Greece twice (Persian Wars) Battle of Marathon (490) Battle of Salamis (480) Athenian empire formed and falls Peloponnesian War... The Indo-Aryan languages form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages. ... Landing of King Vijaya depicted in an Ajanta fresco Vijaya (c. ... The Mahavansha, also Mahawansha, (Pāli: great chronicle) is a historical record, often thought to be the oldest written record oh history, written in the Pāli language, of the Buddhist kings as well as Dravidian kings of Sri Lanka. ... Kalinga in 265 B.C. Kalinga was an ancient Indo-Aryan kingdom of central-eastern India, in the province of Orissa. ... Magadha was an ancient kingdom of India, mentioned in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. ... Prakrit (also spelt Pracrit) (Sanskrit: , original, natural, artless, normal, ordinary, usual, i. ...

Stages of historical development

The development of the Sinhala language is divided into four periods:

• Sinhala Prakrit (until 3rd century CE)
• Proto-Sinhala (3rd - 7th century CE)
• Medieval Sinhala (7th - 12th century CE)
• Modern Sinhala (12th century - present)

Phonetic development

The most important phonetic developments of Sinhala language include the followings:

• the loss of aspirate stops (e.g. kanavā "to eat" corresponds to Sanskrit khādati, Hindi khānā)
• the shortening of all long vowels (compare example above) [Long vowels in the modern language are due to borrowings (e.g. vibāgaya "exam" < Sanskrit vibhāga) and sandhi phenomena either after elision of Intervocalic consonants (e.g. dānavā "to put" < damanavā) or in originally compound words.]
• the simplification of consonant clusters and geminate consonants into geminates or single consonants respectively (e.g. Sanskrit viṣṭā "time" > Sinhala Prakrit viṭṭa > Modern Sinhala viṭa)
• development of /j/ to /d/ (e.g. däla "web" corresponds to Sanskrit jāla)

In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. ... A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. ... Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. ... In music, see elision (music). ... In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (a word) that consists of more than one other lexeme. ... In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ...

Western vs. Eastern Prakrit features

An example for a Western feature in Sinhala is the retention of initial /v/ which developed into /b/ in the Eastern languages (e.g. Sanskrit viṃśati "twenty", Sinhala visi-, Hindi bīs). An example of an Eastern feature is the ending -e for masculine nominative singular (instead of Western -o) in Sinhala Prakrit. There are several cases of mixed vocabulary, e.g. the presence of the words mässā ("fly") and mäkkā ("flea") which both correspond to Sanskrit makṣikā but stem from two regionally different Prakrit words macchiā and makkhikā (as in Pali). Pali (IAST: ) is a Middle Indo-Aryan dialect or prakrit. ...

Ecology

Affinities to neighbouring languages

In addition to many Tamil loanwords, several phonetic and grammatical features present in neighbouring Dravidian languages, setting today's spoken Sinhala apart from its Northern Indo-Aryan siblings, bear witness to the close coexistence of the two groups of speakers. Some of the features that may be traced to Dravidian influence are This is a List of Tamil words in Sinhala Note: For information on the transcription used, see IAST, ISO 15919 and Tamil script. ... For other uses, see Dravidian (disambiguation). ...

• the distinction between short e, o and long ē, ō
• the loss of aspiration
• left-branching syntax
• the use of the verbal adjective of kiyanavā "to say" as a subordinating conjunction with the meanings "that" and "if" (e.g.

"I know that it is new", In linguistics, branching is the general tendency towards a given order of words within sentences and smaller grammatical units within sentences (such as subordinate propositions, prepositional phrases, etc. ... It has been suggested that Non-finite verb be merged into this article or section. ...

"I do not know whether it is new",

Foreign influences

Due to centuries of colonial rule, contemporary Sinhala contains many loanwords from Portuguese, Dutch and English. ...

Dialects

Sinhalese spoken in the Southern province of Sri Lanka (Galle, Matara and Hambantota districts) is highly divergent from that spoken in the Western and Central part. Often foreigners who learn the Western dialect (which is generally considered to be the standard language today) are unable to speak with people from the South. However, for native speakers both dialects are mutually intelligible. Southern Province The Southern Province of Sri Lanka is a small geographic area consisting of the districts of Galle, Matara and Hambantota. ... Galle is a district of Sri Lanka. ... This article is about the district in Sri Lanka. ... This article is about the district in Sri Lanka. ... A standard language (also standard dialect or standardized dialect) is a particular variety of a language that has been given either legal or quasi-legal status. ...

The language of the Veddah resembles Sinhala to a great extent, although it has a large number of words which cannot be traced to another language. The Wanniyala-Aetto, or forest beings, perhaps more commonly known as Veddas or Veddahs (transliteration of වැද්දා in Sinhalese, IPA væððɑː) are an indigenous people of Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. ...

Diglossia

In Sinhala there is distinctive diglossia, as in many languages of South Asia. The literary language and the spoken language differ from each other in many aspects. The written language is used for all forms of literary texts but also orally at formal occasions (public speeches, TV and radio news broadcasts etc.), whereas the spoken language is used as the language of communication in everyday life (see also colloquialism). Look up Diglossia in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A literary language is a register of a language that is used in writing, and which often differs in lexicon and syntax from the language used in speech. ... Spoken language is a language that people utter words of the language. ... For other uses, see Literature (disambiguation). ... Look up Colloquialism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

The most important difference between the two varieties is the lack of inflected verb forms in the spoken language. Inflection of the Spanish lexeme for cat, with blue representing the masculine gender, pink representing the feminine gender, grey representing the form used for mixed-gender, and green representing the plural number. ... It has been suggested that Verbal agreement be merged into this article or section. ...

The situation is analogous to one where Middle or even Old English would be the written language in Great Britain. The children are taught the written language at school almost like a foreign language. Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the... Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon[1], Old English: ) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. ... A foreign language is a language not spoken by the indigenous people of a certain place: for example, English is a foreign language in Japan. ...

Sinhala language also has diverse slang. Some is regarded as taboo and most is frowned upon as non-scholarly.^{[citation needed]} For other uses, see Slang (disambiguation). ...

Characteristics of spoken Sinhala

The Sinhala spoken language has the following characteristics:

Phonology

• The presence of so-called prenasalized stops. A very short homorganic nasal is added before a voiced stop. The nasal is syllabified with the onset of the following syllable, which means that the moraic weight of the preceding syllable is left unchanged (see mora).

Prenasalized stops are phonetic sequences of nasal plus plosive that behave phonologically like single consonant. ... Sagittal section of nose mouth, pharynx, and larynx. ... A nasal consonant is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. ... Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ... A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Mora (plural moras or morae) is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight (which in turn determines stress or timing) in some languages. ... Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips (bilabial articulation) or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). ... Dentals are consonants such as t, d, n, and l articulated with either the lower or the upper teeth, or both, rather than with the gum ridge as in English. ... Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the superior teeth. ... Sub-apical retroflex plosive In phonetics, retroflex consonants are consonant sounds used in some languages. ... Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). ... Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum). ... A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Affricate consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or ) but release as a fricative (such as or or, in a couple of languages, into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel. ... Fricatives (or spirants) are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. ... A nasal consonant is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. ... Rhotic consonants, or R-like sounds, are non-lateral liquid consonants. ... Laterals are L-like consonants pronounced with an occlusion made somewhere along the axis of the tongue, while air from the lungs escapes at one side or both sides of the tongue. ... Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and typical consonants. ...

Morphology

Nominal morphology

The main features marked on Sinhala nouns are case, number, definiteness and animacy. Animacy is a grammatical category, usually of nouns, which influences the form a verb takes when it is associated with that noun. ...

Cases

Sinhala distinguishes a seizable number of cases. Next to the cross-linguistically rather common nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative, there are also less common cases like the instrumental. The exact number of these cases depends on the exact definition of cases one wishes to employ. For instance, the endings for the animate instrumental and locative cases, atiŋ and la^ŋgə, are also independent words meaning "with the hand" and "near" respectively, which is why they are not regarded to be actual case endings by some scholars. Depending on how far an independent word has progressed on a grammaticalization path, scholars will see it as a case marker or not. The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun. ... The term accusative may be used in the following contexts: A form of morphosyntactic alignment, as found in nominative-accusative languages. ... The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ... Dative has several meanings. ... Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Grammaticalisation, also referred to as Grammaticalization, Grammatisation or Grammatization is a theory describing the change of a content word (lexical morpheme) into a function word or grammatical affix. ...

The brackets with most of the vowel length symbols indicate the optional shortening of long vowels in certain unstressed syllables. In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. ...

The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun, which generally marks the subject of a verb, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. ... The accusative case (abbreviated ACC) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. ... In linguistics, the instrumental case (also called the eighth case) indicates that a noun is the instrument or means by which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. ... The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given. ... In linguistics, ablative case (also called the sixth case) (abbreviated ABL) is a name given to cases in various languages whose common thread is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Locative is a case which indicates a location. ... The vocative case is the case used for a noun identifying the person (animal, object, etc. ...

Number marking

In Sinhala animate nouns, the plural is marked with -oː, a long consonant plus -u, or with -laː. Most of the inanimates mark the plural by subtractive morphology. Loan words from English mark the singular with ekə, and do not mark the plural. This can be interpreted as singulative. Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... In linguistics, a singulative form is a form of a noun which expresses the idea of an individual example of the noun; for instance, snowflake may be considered a singulative from snow. In some languages, singulatives can be productively formed from collective nouns; eg Algerian Arabic &#7717;j&#601;&#7771...

On the left hand side of the table, plurals are longer than singulars. On the right hand side, it is the other way round, with the exception of paara "street". Note that [+animate] lexemes are mostly in the classes on the left-hand side, while [-animate] lexemes are most often in the classes on the right hand.

Indefinite article

The indefinite article is -ek for animates and -ak for inanimates. The indefinite article exists only in the singular, where its absence marks definiteness. In the plural, (in)definiteness does not receive special marking.

Verbal morphology

Sinhala distinguishes three conjugation classes Spoken Sinhala does not mark person, number or gender on the verb (Literary Sinhala does), in other words there is no Subject-Verb-agreement.

Syntax

• SOV (Subject Object Verb) word order.
• There are almost no conjunctions as English that or whether, but only non-finite clauses that are formed by the means of participles and verbal adjectives. Example: "The man who writes books" translates to pot̪ liənə miniha, literally "books writing man".
• It is a left-branching language (see branching), which means that determining elements are usually put in front of what they determine (see example above).
• An exemption to this are statements of quantity which usually stand behind what they define. Example: "the four flowers" translates to mal hat̪ərə, literally "flowers four". On the other hand it can be argued that the numeral is the head in this construction, and the flowers the modifier, so that a better English rendering would be "a floral foursome"
• There are no prepositions, only postpositions (see Adposition). Example: "under the book" translates to pot̪ə yaʈə, literally "book under".
• Sinhala has no copula: "I am rich" translates to mamə poːsat̪, literally "I rich". There are two existential verbs, which are used for locative predications, but these verbs are not used for predications of class-membership or property-assignment, unlike English is.

In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. ... In linguistic typology, word order, or more precisely constituent order refers to the permitted combinations of words or larger constituents. ... In linguistics, a non-finite clause is a subordinate clause whose verb is non-finite; for example, many languages can form non-finite clauses from infinitives. ... In linguistics, a participle is a non-finite verb form that can be used in compound tenses or voices, or it can be used as a modifier. ... It has been suggested that Non-finite verb be merged into this article or section. ... In grammar, an adposition is an element that, prototypically, combines syntactically with a phrase and indicates how that phrase should be interpreted in the surrounding context. ... For other uses, see Copula (disambiguation). ...

Semantics

• There is a four-way deictic system (which is rare): There are four demonstrative stems (see demonstrative pronouns) meː "here, close to the speaker", oː "there, close to the person addressed", arə "there, close to a third person, visible" and eː "there, close to a third person, not visible".

In pragmatics and linguistics, deixis (Greek: δειξις display, demonstration, or reference, the meaning point of reference in contemporary linguistics having been taken over from Chrysippus, Stoica 2,65) is a process whereby words or expressions rely absolutely on context. ... In-Silico Modeling and Conformational Mobility of String Pointer Reduction System (SPRS) Based on DNA Computers ... A demonstrative pronoun in grammar and syntax is a pronoun that shows the place of something. ...

Discourse

• Sinhala is a Pro-drop language: arguments of a sentence can be omitted when they can be inferred from context. This is true for subject -- like in Italian for instance -- but also objects and other parts of the sentence can be 'dropped' in Sinhala if they can be inferred. In that sense, Sinhala can be called a "super pro-drop language".

Example: The sentence kohed̪ə gie, literally "where went", can mean "where did I/you/he/she/we... go". A pro-drop language (from pronoun-dropping) is a language where pronouns can be deleted when they are in some sense pragmatically inferable (the precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate). ... According to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle, every sentence can be divided in two main constituents, one being the subject of the sentence and the other being its predicate. ...

Notes

Wilhelm Ludwig Geiger (1856-1943) was a German Orientalist, in the fields of Indian and Iranian languages. ...

References

• Gair, James: Sinhala and Other South Asian Languages, New York 1998.
• Gair, James and Paolillo, John C.: Sinhala, München, Newcastle 1997.
• Geiger, Wilhelm: A Grammar of the Sinhalese Language, Colombo 1938.
• Karunatillake, W.S.: An Introduction to Spoken Sinhala, Colombo 1992 [several new editions].
• Clough, B.: Sinhala English Dictionary, 2nd new & enlarged edition, New Delhi, Asian Educational Services, 1997.

External links

• Guide to Sinhala language & Culture
• Let's Speak Sinhala - online lessons
• Sinhala Word Processor
• Online dictionary (Beta)
• Kapruka Sinhala dictionary
• Madhura Sinhala English Dictionary
• Sinhala dictionary (Beta)
• Sinhala Songs
• Sinhala books/novels
• Sinhala Slang

See also

• Elu

Sinhalese language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sinhalese language edition of Wiktionary, the free dictionary/thesaurus