Sinhala

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(Redirected from Sinhala language)

{{language |name=Sinhala |nativename=සිංහල siṁhala |region=Sri Lanka |speakers=13 million |familycolor=Indo-European |fam2=Indo-Iranian |fam3=Indo-Aryan |fam4=Sinhalese-Maldivian |nation=Sri Lanka |iso1=si|iso2=sin|iso3=sin |notice=Indic}}

Sinhala (also Sinhalese, formerly Singhalese) is the language spoken by the Sinhalese, the largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon). It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The language of the Maldives, Dhivehi is closely related to Sinhala. There are about 13 million native speakers of Sinhala.

The Legend of Prince Vijaya has Sinhala brought to Sri Lanka from India around 500 BC by the Prince and his party of several hundred. Stone inscriptions, as well as written texts (the Mahavamsa, a history of the kings of Sri Lanka going back to almost the Buddha's time) attest to the long history of Sinhala spoken in Sri Lanka.

Sinhala has many literary works strongly influenced by Buddhism, and often followed the literary trends of India— e.g. the sandesha poetry of India, the literary modes used by Kalidasa and similar Indian dramatic poets are all echoed in Sinhalese literature as attested in the literary debates known as Kukavi Vada. The periodic invasion of the north of Sri Lanka by Tamils from south India led to the inclusion in Sinhala of many Tamil words. The assimilation of many Tamil speakers as Sinhalese also has lead to the addition of Tamil words into Sinhalese.^{[citation needed]} While Sri Lanka came under Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial rule in turn, it regained its independence in 1948. Contemporary Sinhalese contains many loanwords of Portuguese, Dutch and English origin.

Nationalist movements in the first half of the 20th century saw the establishment of the helabasa movement, led by the grammarian Munidasa Kumaratunga, which gave new vigour to the language. A more important influence was the rise of an important newspaper culture (led by the Dinamina newspaper established by the Wijaywardena group). A celebrated writer, Martin Wickremasinghe, was one of the well known and influential editors of the Dinamina. A first class exponent of Sinhala was Radio Ceylon broadcaster, writer and lyricist, Karunaratne Abeysekera.

The Sinhala script evolved from the ancient Brahmi script which was introduced to the island in the 6th century BC. At present the Sinhala alphabet has 56 characters with four additional characters added recently to conveniently deal with english letters like f. The Sinhala language is characterized by a high vowel content.

The most divergent dialect of Sinhala is spoken by the Rodiya (Rodi) Caste. The language of the Veddah is closely related to Sinhala, although it has a large number of words which cannot be related to any other language.

Sinhala is one of the constitutionally recognised official languages of Sri Lanka, along with Tamil.

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