| Sinhala (or Sinhalese) is the first language of the Sinhalese, who are the majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka. It is spoken by 15 million native speakers and is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka. Sinhala is also used as a second language by most of the other ethnic groups such as Tamils & Muslims. Sinhala belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Sinhala language has its own writing system which is considered to have links to Brahmi scripts. The evolution of the Sinhala language starts from fifth century when North Indians settled in the island. Modern Sinhala has also been influenced by Portuguese, Dutch and English invasions and therefore it contains many loanwords from those languages. The Sinhala alphabet has 54 letters out of which 18 are vowels and the rest are consonants. The written Sinhala & the spoken Sinhala are different from each other. The spoken Sinhala is used in day to day communication. Written Sinhala may also be used orally in formal occasions. Sinhala is written from left to right and as per Sinhala grammar, the sentences are ordered starting from subject followed by object and then the verb. Sinhala has a many different slang and some of which are considered to be taboo and not used in written form. Sinhala was included in Unicode in 1998. |
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