The Wanniyala-Aetto, or "forest beings" (This is the name they call themselves; the commonly known name is "Veddahs" in Sinhalese) are an indigenous people of Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. They are hunter-gatherers and have lived in their tropical forest environment for the past 18,000 years. They are disappearing rapidly, due to assimilation and the loss of their forest home. Population estimates range from several hundred to a few thousand. The Sinhalese are the majority (14 million) ethnic group of Sri Lanka, who probably came from Northern India. ... In anthropology, the hunter-gatherer way of life is that led by certain societies of the Neolithic Era based on the exploitation of wild plants and animals. ...
Their culture and language slowly started to vanish, and today there is not an original Vedda language remaining, and there is, at the most, only a few hundred Vedda people left that have not inter-married with other races and still practice the old ways of living.
The Vedda marriage ceremony was one of simplicity.
Vedda women are in several ways considered the equals of man. In many cultures a person's decent is traced through the man but in the Vedda culture it is traditionally traced through the woman.
The language of the Veddas has aroused much debate in learned circles ever since the early twentieth century when detailed records of their speech were being published in works such as the Seligmanns' Veddas (1911) and Wilhelm Geiger's Der Sprache der Vaddas (1914).
Vedda speech is also characterised by a high degree of periphrasis where two or more words of Sinhala origin are used to construct a noun or verb.
Vedda women are in several ways considered the equals of man. In many cultures a person's decent is traced through the man but in the Vedda culture it is traditionally traced through the woman.
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