Sinhala
Sinhalese
????? Si?hala
Pronunciation	IPA:  [?siŋ??l?]
Native to	Sri Lanka and Singapore
Ethnicity	Sinhalese people
Native speakers	17.00 million (2012) [1] 3 million L2 speakers (2012) [1]
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Southern Zone Insular Indic Sinhala
Early form	Elu
Dialects	Vedda (perhaps a creole)
Writing system	Sinhala script Sinhala Braille ( Bharati Braille )
Official status
Official language in	Sri Lanka
Language codes
ISO 639-1	si
ISO 639-2	sin
ISO 639-3	sin
Glottolog	sinh1246
Linguasphere	59-ABB-a

Sinhala or Sinhalese , ^[2] earlier referred to as Singhalese, is the language of the Sinhalese . They are largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka . It belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family .

Sinhala has two varieties/forms - Spoken and Written, the former being the most popular form. Spoken Sinhala is easier to learn and use because it is so much relaxed in grammatical formality and rigidity. ^[3]

Sinhala is spoken by about 19 million people in Sri Lanka, about 16 million of them are native speakers. It is one of the constitutionally-recognised official languages of Sri Lanka, with Tamil . ^[4] Sinhala has its own writing system (see Sinhala script ) which is an offspring of the Indian Brahmi script .

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

The closest relative of Sinhala is Dhivehi , the language of the Maldives , .

The word order of Sinhala language is SOV (subject-object-verb) just like Japanese , Korean and many other languages in Asia. It would be easy for people from that particular language style to learn Sinhala with a little time and practice.

Ex 1 :

      I     home   go
      Mama  gedara yanawa.

Ex 2 :

      beautiful  dress
      Lassana    anduma

Morphologically, the words are built with the stem followed by a particle. The particle can vary so that it adds more grammatical change into the word connecting it to the whole sentence.

pusa yanawa -

kitten is going.

pusath yanawa -

kitten is also going.

ballata denawa -

giving (it) to the dog

ballatath denawa

giving it to the dog as well

ballatama denawa

giving it to the dog itself.

If you really take a good look at these sentences, you may easily find the stem of the words: pusa, pusath; ballata, ballathath, ballatama.

pusa- is the stem of the subjectival phrase. (kitten)

Pusa + th - as well

pusa + ta - to kitty

pusa + ta + th - to kitty as well

pusa + ta + ma - to kitty itself ^^

Writing system [ change | change source ]

References [ change | change source ]

Sinhala edition of Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia