Sinhalese language

Sinhalese
සිංහල sinhala
Region	Sri Lanka
Native speakers	16 million (2007) 2 million second language (1997)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Southern Zone Sinhalese
Early forms	Elu Sinhalese
Dialects	Vedda (perhaps a creole)
Writing system	Sinhala alphabet Sinhalese 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

Sinhalese (/sɪnəˈliːz/), known natively as Sinhala (Sinhalese: සිංහල; singhala [ˈsiŋɦələ]), is the native language of the Sinhalese people, who make up the largest ethnic group in Sri Lanka, numbering about 16 million. Sinhalese is also spoken as a second language by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, totalling about three million. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Sinhalese has its own writing system, the Sinhala alphabet, which is one of the Brahmic scripts, a descendant of the ancient Indian Brahmi script closely related to the Kadamba alphabet.

Sinhalese is one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka. Sinhalese, along with Pali, played a major role in the development of Theravada Buddhist literature.

The oldest Sinhalese Prakrit inscriptions found are from the third to second century BCE following the arrival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, the oldest existing literary works date from the ninth century. The closest relative of Sinhalese is the language of the Maldives and Minicoy Island (India), the Maldivian language.

Etymology

Main article: Names of Sri Lanka § Sinhala

Sinhala (Siṃhāla) is a Sanskrit term; the corresponding Middle Indo-Aryan (Eḷu) word is Sīhala. The name is a derivation from siṃha, the Sanskrit word for "lion" Siṃhāla is attested as a Sanskrit name of the island of in the Bhagavata Purana. The name is sometimes glossed as "abode of lions", and attributed to a supposed former abundance of lions on the island.

History

According to the chronicle Mahavamsa, written in Pali, Prince Vijaya and his entourage merged with two exotic tribes of ancient India present in Lanka, the Yakkha and Naga peoples. In the following centuries, there was substantial immigration from Eastern India (Kalinga, Magadha) which led to an admixture of features of Eastern Prakrits.

Stages of historical development

The development of the Sinhalese language is divided into four periods:

• Sinhalese Prakrit (until 3rd century AD)
• Proto-Sinhalese (3rd - 7th century AD)
• Medieval Sinhalese (7th - 12th century AD)
• Modern Sinhalese (12th century — present)

Phonetic development

The most important phonetic developments of the Sinhalese language include

• the loss of the aspiration distinction (e.g. kanavā "to eat" corresponds to Sanskrit khādati, Hindi khānā)
• the loss of a vowel length distinction; long vowels in the modern language are due to loanwords (e.g. vibāgaya "exam" < Sanskrit vibhāga) and sandhi, either after elision of Intervocalic consonants (e.g. dānavā "to put" < damanavā) or in originally compound words.
• the simplification of consonant clusters and geminate consonants into geminates and single consonants respectively (e.g. Sanskrit viṣṭā "time" > Sinhalese Prakrit viṭṭa > Modern Sinhalese viṭa)
• development of /j/ to /d/ (e.g. däla "web" corresponds to Sanskrit jāla)

Western vs. Eastern Prakrit features

An example for a Western feature in Sinhalese is the retention of initial /v/ which developed into /b/ in the Eastern languages (e.g. Sanskrit viṃśati "twenty", Sinhalese visi-, Hindi bīs). An example of an Eastern feature is the ending -e for masculine nominative singular (instead of Western -o) in Sinhalese Prakrit. There are several cases of vocabulary doublets, e.g. the words mässā ("fly") and mäkkā ("flea"), which both correspond to Sanskrit makṣikā but stem from two regionally different Prakrit words macchiā and makkhikā (as in Pali).

Pre-1815 Sinhalese literature

During the career of Christopher Reynolds as a Sinhalese lecturer at the SOAS, University of London, he extensively researched the Sinhalese language and its pre-1815 literature: the Sri Lankan government awarded him the Sri Lanka Ranjana medal for this. He wrote the 377-page An anthology of Sinhalese literature up to 1815, selected by the UNESCO National Commission of Ceylon

Ecology

Substratum influence in Sinhalese

According to Geiger, Sinhalese has features that set it apart from other Indo-Aryan languages. Some of the differences can be explained by the substrate influence of the parent stock of the Vedda language. 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. Common examples are kola for leaf in Sinhala and Vedda, dola for pig in Vedda and offering in Sinhala. Other common words are rera for wild duck, and gala for stones (in toponyms used throughout the island). There are also high frequency words denoting body parts in Sinhala, such as olluva for head, kakula for leg, bella for neck and kalava for thighs, that are derived from pre-Sinhalese languages of Sri Lanka. The author of the oldest Sinhalese grammar, Sidatsangarava, written in the 13th century CE, recognised a category of words that exclusively belonged to early Sinhala. The grammar lists naramba (to see) and kolamba (fort or harbour) as belonging to an indigenous source. Kolamba is the source of the name of the commercial capital Colombo.

Affinities to neighbouring languages

In addition to many Tamil loanwords, several phonetic and grammatical features present in neighbouring Dravidian languages, setting today's spoken Sinhalese apart from its Northern Indo-Aryan siblings, bear witness to the close interactions with Dravidian speakers. However, formal Sinhalese is more similar to Pali and medieval Sinhalese. Some of the features that may be traced to Dravidian influence are

• the distinction between short e, o and long ē, ō
• the loss of aspiration
• left-branching syntax
• the use of the attributive verb of kiyana "to say" as a subordinating conjunction with the meanings "that" and "if", e.g.:

ēka	aluth	kiyalā	mama	dannawā
it	new	having-said	I	know

"I know that it is new."

ēka	aluth-da	kiyalā	mama	dannē	nähä
it	new-?	having-said	I	know.emph	not

"I do not know whether it is new."

Foreign influence

As a result of centuries of colonial rule, contemporary Sinhalese contains some Portuguese, Dutch and English loanwords.

Influences on other languages

Macanese Patois or Macau Creole (known as Patuá to its speakers) is a creole language derived mainly from Malay, Sinhalese, Cantonese, and Portuguese, which was originally spoken by the Macanese people of the Portuguese colony of Macau. It is now spoken by a few families in Macau and in the Macanese diaspora.

The language developed first mainly among the descendants of Portuguese settlers who often married women from Malacca and Sri Lanka rather than from neighbouring China, so the language had strong Malay and Sinhalese influence from the beginning.

Numerals

Main article: Sinhala numerals

Sinhalese shares many features common to other Indo-European languages. Shared vocabulary includes the numbers up to ten:

Sinhalese

Sanskrit

Persian

Greek

Latin

Portuguese

Romanian

German

English

French

Spanish

Russian

Italian

Latvian

Lithuanian

1

eka (එක)

éka

yek (یک)

(h)éna (ἕνα)

unus

um

unu

eins

one

un

uno

odin

uno

viens

vienas

2

deka (දෙක)

dváu

do (دو)

dío (δύο)

duo

dois

doi

zwei

two

deux

dos

dva

due

divi

du

3

tuna (තුන)

trayas

se (سه)

tría (τρία)

tria

três

trei

drei

three

trois

tres

tri

tre

trīs

trys

4

hatara (හතර)

catúr

chahār (چهار)

téssera (τέσσερα)

quattuor

quatro

patru

vier

four

quatre

cuatro

chetyre

quattro

četri

keturi

5

paha (පහ)

páñca

panj (پنج)

pénte (πέντε)

quinque

cinco

cinci

fünf

five

cinq

cinco

pyat'

cinque

pieci

penki

6

haya (හය)

ṣaṣ

shesh (شش)

(h)éxi (ἕξι)

sex

seis

șase

sechs

six

six

seis

shest'

sei

seši

šeši

7

hata (හත)

saptá

haft (هفت)

(h)eptá (ἑπτά)

septem

sete

șapte

sieben

seven

sept

siete

sem'

sette

septiņi

septyni

8

aṭa (අට)

aṣṭáu

hasht (هشت)

októ (ὀκτώ)

octo

oito

opt

acht

eight

huit

ocho

vosem'

otto

astoņi

aštuoni

9

nawaya (නවය)

náva

noh (نه)

ennéa (ἐννέα)

novem

nove

nouă

neun

nine

neuf

nueve

devyat'

nove

deviņi

devyni

10

dahaya (දහය)

dáça

dah (ده)

déka (δέκα)

decem

dez

zece

zehn

ten

dix

diez

desyat'

dieci

desmit

dešimt

Accents and dialects

Sinhalese spoken in the Southern Province (Galle, Matara and Hambantota Districts) uses several words that are not found elsewhere in the country; this is also the case for the Central and North-Central Provinces and south-eastern region (Uva Province and the surrounding area). For native speakers all dialects are mutually intelligible, and they might not even realise that the differences are significant.

The language of the Vedda people resembles Sinhala to a great extent, although it has a large number of words which cannot be traced to another language. The Rodiya use another dialect of Sinhalese.

Diglossia

In Sinhalese there is distinctive diglossia, as in many languages of South Asia. The literary language and the spoken language differ from each other in many aspects. The written language is used for all forms of literary texts but also orally at formal occasions (public speeches, TV and radio news broadcasts, etc.), whereas the spoken language is used as the language of communication in everyday life (see also Sinhala slang and colloquialism). As a rule the literary language uses more Sanskrit-based words.

The most important difference between the two varieties is the lack of inflected verb forms in the spoken language.

The situation is analogous to one where Middle or even Old English would be the written language in Great Britain. The children are taught the written language at school almost like a foreign language.

Sinhalese also has diverse slang. Most slang were regarded as taboo and most was frowned upon as non-scholarly. However, nowadays Sinhalese slang, even the ones with sexual references are commonly used among younger Sri Lankans.

Writing system

Main articles: Sinhala alphabet and Sinhalese Braille

The Sinhala alphabet, Sinhala hodiya, is based on the ancient Brahmi script, as are most Indian scripts. The Sinhala alphabet is closely related to South Indian Grantha alphabet and Khmer alphabet taken the elements from the related Kadamba alphabet.

The Sinhala writing system is an abugida, where the consonants are written with letters while the vowels are indicated with diacritics (pilla) on those consonants, unlike English where both consonants and vowels are full letters, or Urdu where vowels need not be written at all. Also, when a diacritic is not used, an "inherent vowel", either /a/ or /ə/, is understood, depending on the position of the consonant within the word. For example, the letter ක k on its own indicates ka, either /ka/ or /kə/. The various vowels are written කා kā, කැ kä, කෑ kǟ (after the consonant), කි ki, කී kī (above the consonant), කු ku, කූ kū (below the consonant), කෙ ke, කේ kē (before the consonant), කො ko, කෝ kō (surrounding the consonant). There are also a few diacritics for consonants, such as r. For simple /k/ without a vowel, a vowel-cancelling diacritic (virama) called hal kirīma is used: ක් k. Several of these diacritics occur in two forms, which depend on the shape of the consonant letter. Vowels also have independent letters but these are only used at the beginning of words where there is no preceding consonant to add a diacritic to.

The complete alphabet consist of 54 letters, 18 for vowels and 36 for consonants. However, only 36 (12 vowels and 24 consonants) are required for writing colloquial spoken Sinhala (suddha Sinhala). The rest indicate sounds that have gotten lost in the course of linguistic change, such as the aspirates, are restricted to Sanskrit and Pali loan words.

Sinhalese is written from left to right and the Sinhala character set (the Sinhala script) is only used for this one language. The alphabetic sequence is similar to those of other Brahmic scripts:

a/ā ä/ǟ i/ī u/ū [ŗ] e/ē [ai] o/ō [au] k [kh] g [g] ṅ c [ch] j [jh] [ñ] ṭ [ṭa] ṭ [ṭh] ḍ [ḍh] ṇ t [th] d [dh] n p [ph] b [bh] m y r l v [ś ṣ] s h ḷ f

Phonology

• The presence of so-called prenasalized consonants. A very short homorganic nasal is added before a voiced stop consonants. The nasal is syllabified with the onset of the following syllable, which means that the moraic weight of the preceding syllable is left unchanged.
• The pronunciation of unstressed short /a/, which is not written in Sinhala orthography except when initial, is a schwa [ə].

		Labial	Dental/ Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m	n̪	ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
Stop	voiceless	p	t̪	ʈ	tʃ	k
	voiced	b	d̪	ɖ	dʒ	ɡ
	prenasalised	ᵐb	ⁿ̪d̪	ᶯɖ		ᵑɡ
Fricative		(f)	s		(ʃ)		h
Rhotic			r
Approximant		ʋ	l		j

	Front		Central		Back
	short	long	short	long	short	long
Close	i	iː			u	uː
Mid	e	eː	a		o	oː
Open	æ	æː		aː

Morphology

Nominal morphology

The main features marked on Sinhala nouns are case, number, definiteness and animacy.

Cases

Sinhala distinguishes several cases. Next to the cross-linguistically rather common nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative, there are also less common cases like the instrumental. The exact number of these cases depends on the exact definition of cases one wishes to employ. For instance, the endings for the animate instrumental and locative cases, atiŋ and laᵑgə, are also independent words meaning "with the hand" and "near" respectively, which is why they are not regarded to be actual case endings by some scholars. Depending on how far an independent word has progressed on a grammaticalisation path, scholars will see it as a case marker or not.

The brackets with most of the vowel length symbols indicate the optional shortening of long vowels in certain unstressed syllables.

	animate sg	inanimate sg	animate pl	inanimate pl
NOM	miniha(ː)	potə	minissu	pot
ACC	miniha(ː)və	potə	minissu(nvə)	pot
INSTR	miniha(ː) atiŋ	poteŋ	minissu(n) atiŋ	potvəliŋ
DAT	miniha(ː)ʈə	potəʈə	minissu(ɳ)ʈə	potvələʈə
ABL	miniha(ː)geŋ	poteŋ	minissu(n)geŋ	potvaliŋ
GEN	miniha(ː)ge(ː)	pote(ː)	minissu(ŋ)ge(ː)	potvələ
LOC	miniha(ː) laᵑgə	pote(ː)	minissu(n) laᵑgə	potvələ
VOC	miniho(ː)	-	minissuneː	-
Gloss	man	book	men	books

Number marking

In Sinhala animate nouns, the plural is marked with -o(ː), a long consonant plus -u, or with -la(ː). Most inanimates mark the plural through disfix. Loanwords from English mark the singular with ekə, and do not mark the plural. This can be interpreted as a singulative number.

SG	ammaː	deviyaː	horaː	pothə	reddə	kanthoːruvə	sathiyə	bus ekə	paːrə
PL	amməla(ː)	deviyo(ː)	horu	poth	redi	kanthoːru	sathi	bus	paːrəval
Gloss	mother(s)	god(s)	thief(ves)	book(s)	cloth(es)	office(s)	week(s)	bus(ses)	street(s)

On the left hand side of the table, plurals are longer than singulars. On the right hand side, it is the other way round, with the exception of paːrə "street". Note that [+animate] lexemes are mostly in the classes on the left-hand side, while [-animate] lexemes are most often in the classes on the right hand.

Indefinite article

The indefinite article is -ek for animates and -ak for inanimates. The indefinite article exists only in the singular, where its absence marks definiteness. In the plural, (in)definiteness does not receive special marking.

Verbal morphology

Sinhala distinguishes three conjugation classes. Spoken Sinhala does not mark person, number or gender on the verb (literary Sinhala does). In other words, there is no subject–verb agreement.

	1st class		2nd class		3rd class
	verb	verbal adjective	verb	verbal adjective	verb	verbal adjective
present (future)	kanəvaː	kanə	arinəvaː	arinə	pipenəvaː	pipenə
past	kæːvaː	kæːvə	æriyaː	æriyə	pipunaː	pipunə
anterior	kaːlaː	kaːpu	ærəlaː	ærəpu	pipilaː	pipicca
simultaneous	kanə kanə / ka kaa(spoken)	/	arinə arinə / æra æra(spoken)	/	pipenə pipenə/ pipi pipi(spoken)	/
infinitive	kannə/kanḍə	/	arinnə/arinḍə	/	pipennə/pipenḍə	/
emphatic form	kanneː	/	arinneː	/	pipenneː	/
gloss	eat	/	open	/	blossom	/

Syntax

• Left-branching language (see branching), which means that determining elements are usually put in front of what they determine (see example below).
• SOV (subject–object–verb) word order, common to most left-branching languages.
• As a left-branching language, there are no prepositions, only postpositions (see Adposition). Example: "under the book" translates to pot̪ə yaʈə, literally "book under".
• There are almost no conjunctions as English that or whether, but only non-finite clauses that are formed by the means of participles and verbal adjectives. Example: "The man who writes books" translates to pot̪ liənə miniha, literally "books writing man".
• An exception to this is statements of quantity which usually stand behind what they define. Example: "the four flowers" translates to mal hat̪ərə, literally "flowers four". On the other hand, it can be argued that the numeral is the head in this construction, and the flowers the modifier, so that a better English rendering would be "a floral foursome"
• Sinhala has no copula: "I am rich" translates to mamə poːsat̪, literally "I rich". There are two existential verbs, which are used for locative predications, but these verbs are not used for predications of class-membership or property-assignment, unlike English is.

Semantics

There is a four-way deictic system (which is rare): There are four demonstrative stems (see demonstrative pronouns) meː "here, close to the speaker", oː "there, close to the person addressed", arə "there, close to a third person, visible" and eː "there, close to a third person, not visible".

Discourse

Sinhala is a pro-drop language: Arguments of a sentence can be omitted when they can be inferred from context. This is true for subject—as in Italian, for instance—but also objects and other parts of the sentence can be "dropped" in Sinhala if they can be inferred. In that sense, Sinhala can be called a "super pro-drop language", like Japanese.

Example: The sentence [koɦed̪ə ɡie], literally "where went", can mean "where did I/you/he/she/we... go".

See also

• Sinhala slang
• Sinhala honorifics
• Sinhala keyboard
• Sinhalese people

Further reading

• Gair, James: Sinhala and Other South Asian Languages, New York 1998.
• Gair, James and Paolillo, John C.: Sinhala, München, Newcastle 1997.
• Geiger, Wilhelm: A Grammar of the Sinhalese Language, Colombo 1938.
• Karunatillake, W.S.: An Introduction to Spoken Sinhala, Colombo 1992 [several new editions].
• Clough, B.: Sinhala English Dictionary, 2nd new & enlarged edition, New Delhi, Asian Educational Services, 1997.

External links

• Charles Henry Carter. A Sinhalese-English dictionary. Colombo: The "Ceylon Observer" Printing Works; London: Probsthain & Co., 1924.
• Simhala Sabdakosa Karyamsaya. Sanksipta Simhala Sabdakosaya. Kolamba : Samskrtika Katayutu Pilibanda Departamentuva, 2007-2009.
• Madura Online English-Sinhala Dictionary and Language Translator
• Kapruka Sinhala dictionary
• Sinhala dictionary resources online
• Sinhala Dictionary
• Sinhala Script
• Sinhala dictionary (Beta)
• Sinhala for iOS