 | Sinhala Dictionary Collection including Sinhala - English & Tamil Dictionaries. Sinhala English Glossaries of Various Disciplines. Search in Sinhala, English or Tamil Words. |
| 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. Sinhalese has many words that are only found in Sinhalese, or shared between Sinhalese and Vedda and not etymologically derivable from Middle or Old Indo-Aryan. Modern Sinhala has also been influenced by Portuguese, Dutch and English invasions and therefore it contains many loanwords from those languages. The written Sinhala & the spoken Sinhala are different from each other. The spoken Sinhala is used in day to day communication. 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. |
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| The Sinhala script originated from the Brahmi script, thought to have been brought from Northern India, around the 3rd century B.C. The Sinhala alphabet is an abugida used in Sri Lanka to write the official language Sinhala and also sometimes the liturgical languages Pali and Sanskrit. Being a member of the Brahmic family of scripts, the Sinhala script can trace its ancestry back more than 2000 years.Sinhala is often considered two alphabets, or an alphabet within an alphabet, due to the presence of two sets of letters. The core set, known as the śuddha siṃhala (pure Sinhala) can represent all native phonemes. In order to render Sanskrit and Pali words, an extended set, the miśra siṃhala (mixed Sinhala), is available. The alphabet is written from left to right. The modern Sinhala alphabet has 54 letters out of which 18 are vowels and the rest are consonants. |
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