| Sinhala | |
| Nativename: | Sinhala; Sinhalese: සිංහල |
| Pronunciation: | in Sinhala; Sinhalese pronounced as /ˈsiŋɦələ/ |
| Ethnicity: | Sinhalese |
| Speakers: | L1 million |
| Date: | 2021 |
| Ref: | e27 |
| Speakers2: | L2 million (1997) |
| Speakers Label: | Speakers |
| Familycolor: | Indo-European |
| Fam2: | Indo-Iranian |
| Fam3: | Indo-Aryan |
| Fam4: | Southern Zone |
| Fam5: | Insular Indo-Aryan |
| Fam6: | Dhivehi–Sinhala |
| Ancestor: | Elu |
| Dia1: | Vedda (perhaps a Creole language) |
| Script: | |
| Nation: | Sri Lanka |
| Iso1: | si |
| Iso2: | sin |
| Iso3: | sin |
| Lingua: | 59-ABB-a |
| Glotto: | sinh1246 |
| Glottorefname: | Sinhala |
| Notice: | Indic |
| Notice2: | IPA |
| Map: | File:Sinhala_languages_distributon.png |
Sinhala (; Sinhala: Sinhala; Sinhalese: සිංහල,, in Sinhala; Sinhalese pronounced as /ˈsiŋɦələ/),[1] sometimes called Sinhalese, is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka, who make up the largest ethnic group on the island, numbering about 16 million.[2] Sinhala is also spoken as the first language by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, totalling about 2 million speakers as of 2001.[3] It is written using the Sinhala script, which is a Brahmic script closely related to the Grantha script of South India.[4]
Sinhala is one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka, alongside Tamil. Along with Pali, it played a major role in the development of Theravada Buddhist literature.
Early forms of the Sinhala language are attested as early as the 3rd century BCE.[5] The language of these inscriptions, still retaining long vowels and aspirated consonants, is a Prakrit similar to Magadhi, a regional associate of the Middle Indian Prakrits that had been used during the time of the Buddha.[6] The most closely related languages are the Vedda language (an endangered, indigenous creole still spoken by a minority of Sri Lankans, mixing Sinhala with an isolate of unknown origin and from which Old Sinhala borrowed various aspects into its main Indo-Aryan substrate), and the Maldivian language.It has two main varieties, written and spoken, and is a conspicuous example of the linguistic phenomenon known as diglossia.[7] [8]
Sinhala is a Sanskrit term; the corresponding Middle Indo-Aryan (Eḷu) word is .The name is a derivative of , the Sanskrit word for 'lion'. The name is sometimes glossed as 'abode of lions', and attributed to a supposed former abundance of lions on the island.[9]
According to the chronicle Mahāvaṃsa, written in Pali, Prince Vijaya of the Vanga Kingdom and his entourage merged in Sri Lanka with later settlers from the Pandya kingdom.[10] [11] [12] In the following centuries, there was substantial immigration from Eastern India, including additional migration from the Vanga Kingdom (Bengal), as well as Kalinga and Magadha.[13] This influx led to an admixture of features of Eastern Prakrits.
The development of Sinhala is divided into four epochs:[14]
The most important phonetic developments of Sinhala include:
According to Wilhelm Geiger, an example of a possible Western feature in Sinhala is the retention of initial pronounced as //v// which developed into pronounced as //b// in the Eastern languages (e.g. Sanskrit "twenty", Sinhala, Hindi). This is disputed by Muhammad Shahidullah who says that Sinhala Prakrit branched off from the Eastern Prakrits prior to this change. He cites the edicts of Ashoka, no copy of which shows this sound change.[15]
An example of an Eastern feature is the ending for masculine nominative singular (instead of Western) in Sinhalese Prakrit. There are several cases of vocabulary doublets, one example being the words ("fly") and ("flea"), which both correspond to Sanskrit but stem from two regionally different Prakrit words (Western Prakrits) and (as in Eastern Prakrits like Pali).
In 1815, the island of Ceylon came under British rule. During the career of Christopher Reynolds as a Sinhalese lecturer at the School of African and Oriental Studies, 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 his work. He wrote the 377-page An anthology of Sinhalese literature up to 1815, selected by the UNESCO National Commission of Ceylon[16]
According to Wilhelm Geiger, Sinhala 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. Sinhala has many words that are only found in Sinhala, or shared between Sinhala and Vedda and not etymologically derivable from Middle or Old Indo-Aryan. Possible examples include for leaf in Sinhala and Vedda (although others suggest a Dravidian origin for this word.[17] [18] [19]), 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, although others have also suggested a Dravidian origin).[20] [21] There are also high frequency words denoting body parts in Sinhala, such as for head, for leg, for neck and for thighs, that are derived from pre-Sinhalese languages of Sri Lanka. The oldest Sinhala grammar,, written in the 13th century CE, recognised a category of words that exclusively belonged to early Sinhala. The grammar lists (to see) and (fort or harbour) as belonging to an indigenous source. is the source of the name of the commercial capital Colombo.
The consistent left branching syntax and the loss of aspirated stops in Sinhala is attributed to a probable South Dravidian substratum effect.[22] This has been explained by a period of prior bilingualism:
In addition to many Tamil loanwords, several phonetic and grammatical features also present in neighbouring Dravidian languages set modern spoken Sinhala apart from its Northern Indo-Aryan relatives. These features are evidence of close interactions with Dravidian speakers. Some of the features that may be traced to Dravidian influence are:
As a result of centuries of colonial rule, interaction, settlement, intermarriage and assimilation, modern Sinhala contains many Portuguese, Dutch and English loanwords.
Macanese Patois or Macau Creole (known as Patuá to its speakers) is a creole language derived mainly from Malay, Sinhala, 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 Sinhala influence from the beginning.
The Sinhala language has different types of variations which are commonly identified as 'dialects and accents'. Among those variations,
People from Uva province also have a unique linguistic variation in relation to the pronunciation of words. In general, Sinhala singular words are pluralized by adding suffixes like O, hu, wal or waru. But when it comes to Monaragala, the situation is somewhat different as when nouns are pluralized a nasal sound is added.
The Kamath language (an indigenous language of paddy culture) used by the Southerners is somewhat different from the 'Kamath language' used in other parts (Uva, Kandy) of Sri Lanka as it is marked with a systematic variation; 'boya' at the end of the majority of nouns as the examples below show.
Crops: Sinhala; Sinhalese: Kurakkan '''boya''' (bran)
Sinhala; Sinhalese: Rambakan '''boya''' (banana)
Tools: Sinhala; Sinhalese: Thattu '''boya''' (bucket)
Other words: Sinhala; Sinhalese: Nivahan '''boya''' (home)
Here the particular word 'boya' means 'a little' in the Southern region and at the end of most of nouns, 'boya' is added regularly. This particular word 'boya' is added to most words by the Southern villages as a token of respect towards the things (those things can be crops, tools etc.) they are referring to.
| Ayye heta wapuranna enwada? (Elder Brother, Are you coming to sow tomorrow?) | Ayya heta wapuranta enawada? (Kandy) Ayye heta wapuranda enawada? (Kegalle) Ayye heta wapuranna enawai? (Galle) | Here the Kandy people say 'Ayya' while the Kegalle and Galle people say 'Ayye'. Also, Kandy people add a ta sound at the end of verbs while the Kegalle people add a da sound. But Galle people's regional variation is not visible in relation to this particular verb; 'wapuranawa' (to sow). Yet their unique regional variation is visible in relation to the second verb which is 'enawai' (coming) as they add ai at the end of most verbs. |
Even though the Kandy, Kegalle and Galle people pronounce words with slight differences, the Sinhalese can understand the majority of the sentences.
In Sinhala there is distinctive diglossia, where the literary language and the spoken language differ from each other in significant ways. While the lexicon can vary continuously between formal and informal contexts, there is a sharp contrast between two distinct systems for syntax and morphology. The literary language is used in writing for all forms of prose, poetry, and for official documents, but also orally for TV and radio news broadcasts. The spoken language is used in everyday life and spans informal and formal contexts. Religious sermons, university lectures, political speeches, and personal letters occupy an intermediate space where features from both spoken and literary Sinhala are used together, and choices about which to include give different impressions of the text.[24]
A number of syntactic and morphological differences exist between the two varieties. The most apparent difference is the absence of subject-verb agreement in spoken Sinhala. Agreement is the hallmark of literary Sinhala, and is the sole characteristic used in determining whether a given example of Sinhala is in the spoken or literary variety. Other distinctions include:
See main article: Sinhala script and Sinhala Braille.
The Sinhala script,, is based on the ancient Brahmi script, and is thus a Brahmic script along with most Indian scripts and many Southeast Asian scripts. The Sinhala script is closely related to Grantha script and Khmer script, but it has also taken some elements from the related Kadamba script.[26] [4]
The writing system for Sinhala is an abugida, where the consonants are written with letters while the vowels are indicated with diacritics on those consonants, unlike alphabets like English where both consonants and vowels are full letters, or abjads like Urdu where vowels need not be written at all. Also, when a diacritic is not used, an "inherent vowel", either pronounced as //a// or pronounced as //ə//, is understood, depending on the position of the consonant within the word. For example, the letter ක on its own indicates, realized as pronounced as //ka// in stressed syllables and pronounced as //kə// in unstressed syllables. The other monophthong vowels are written: කා pronounced as //kaː//, කැ pronounced as //kæ//, and කෑ pronounced as //kæː// (after the consonant); කි pronounced as //ki// and කී pronounced as //kiː// (above the consonant); කු pronounced as //ku// and කූ pronounced as //kuː// (below the consonant); කෙ pronounced as //ke// and කේ pronounced as //keː// (before the consonant); and lastly, කො pronounced as //ko// and කෝ pronounced as //koː// (surrounding the consonant). For simple pronounced as //k// without a following vowel, a vowel-cancelling diacritic called Sinhala; Sinhalese: හල් කිරීම (pronounced as //hal kiriːmə//,) is used, creating ක් pronounced as //k//.
There are also a few diacritics for consonants, such as pronounced as //r// in special circumstances, although the tendency now is to spell words with the full letter ර pronounced as //r//, with a on whichever consonant has no vowel following it. One word that is still spelt with an "r" diacritic is ශ්රී, as in Sinhala; Sinhalese: ශ්රී ලංකාව . The "r" diacritic is the curved line under the first letter ("ශ" → "ශ්ර"). A second diacritic representing the vowel sound pronounced as //iː// completes the word ("ශ්ර" → "ශ්රී").
Several of these diacritics occur in two or more forms, and the form used depends 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 script consists of about 60 letters, 18 for vowels and 42 for consonants. However, only 57 (16 vowels and 41 consonants) are required for writing colloquial spoken Sinhala . The rest indicate sounds that have been merged in the course of linguistic change, such as the aspirates, and are restricted to Sanskrit and Pali loan words. One letter (Sinhala; Sinhalese: ඦ), representing the sound pronounced as //ⁿd͡ʒa//, is attested in the script, although only a few words using this letter are known (Sinhala; Sinhalese: වෑංඦන, ඉඦූ).
The Sinhala script is written from left to right, and is mainly used for Sinhala. It is also used for the liturgical languages Pali and Sanskrit, which are important in Buddhism and academic works. The alphabetic sequence is similar to those of other Brahmic scripts:
Sinhala has a smaller consonant inventory than most Indo-Aryan languages, but simultaneously has a larger vowel inventory than most. As an insular Indo-Aryan language, it and Dhivehi have features divergent from rest of the Indo-Aryan languages. Sinhala's nasal consonants are unusual among Indo-Aryan languages for lacking the retroflex nasal pronounced as /link/ while retaining nasals in the other four positions. Sinhala and Dhivehi are together unique for having prenasalised consonants, which are not found in any other Indo-Aryan language.
Sinhala has so-called prenasalised consonants, or 'half nasal' consonants. A short homorganic nasal occurs before a voiced stop, it is both shorter than a nasal alone and shorter than a sequence of nasal plus stop. The nasal is syllabified with the onset of the following syllable, which means that the moraic weight of the preceding syllable is left unchanged. For example, 'copper' contrasts with 'boil'.
All consonants other than the prenasalised consonants,,,, and can be geminated (occur as double consonants), but only between vowels. In contexts that otherwise trigger gemination, prenasalised consonants become the corresponding nasal-voiced consonant sequence (e.g. pronounced as //ⁿd// is replaced with pronounced as /nd/).
| Labial | Dental/ Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| voiceless | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| voiced | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| prenasalised | pronounced as /ᵐb/ | pronounced as /ⁿd/ | pronounced as /ᶯɖ/ | (pronounced as /ⁿdʒ/) | pronounced as /ᵑɡ/ | |||
| Fricative | (pronounced as /link/~pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ | (pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| Trill | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
pronounced as //ʃ// is found in learned borrowings from Sanskrit, including in the honorific Sinhala; Sinhalese: ශ්රී, found in phrases including the country's name, Sri Lanka (Sinhala; Sinhalese: ශ්රී ලංකා, pronounced as //ʃriː laŋkaː//). pronounced as //f~ɸ// is restricted to loans, typically for English. They are commonly sometimes replaced by pronounced as //p// and pronounced as //s// respectively. Some speakers use pronounced as /link/, as in English, and some use pronounced as /link/ due to its similarity to the native pronounced as /link/.
Sinhala has seven vowel qualities, with a phonemic vowel length distinction between long and short for all qualities, giving a total inventory of 14 vowels. The long vowel pronounced as //əː// is not present in native Sinhala words, but instead is found in certain English loanwords. Like in non-rhotic dialects of English, this long vowel can be represented by the short vowel followed by an r (Sinhala; Sinhalese: ර්), as in Sinhala; Sinhalese: ෂර්ට් pronounced as //ʃəːʈ// ("shirt").[27]
| Front | Central | Back | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| short | long | short | long | short | long | ||
| Close | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | (pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
| Open | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
pronounced as //a// and pronounced as //ə// have a largely complementary distribution, found primarily in stressed and unstressed syllables, respectively. However, there are certain contrasting pairs between the two phonemes, particularly between homographs Sinhala; Sinhalese: කර pronounced as //karə// ("shoulder") and Sinhala; Sinhalese: කර pronounced as //kərə// ("to do"). In writing, pronounced as //a// and pronounced as //ə// are both spelt without a vowel sign attached to the consonant letter, so the patterns of stress in the language must be used to determine the correct pronunciation. Stress is largely predictable and only contrastive between words in relatively few cases, so this does not present a problem for determining the pronunciation of a given word.[28]
Most Sinhala syllables are of the form CV. The first syllable of each word is stressed, with the exception of the verb Sinhala; Sinhalese: කරනවා pronounced as //kərənəˈwaː// ("to do") and all of its inflected forms where the first syllable is unstressed. Syllables using long vowels are always stressed. The remainder of the syllables are unstressed if they use a short vowel, unless they are immediately followed by one of: a CCV syllable, final pronounced as //j(i)// (Sinhala; Sinhalese: -යි), final pronounced as //wu// (Sinhala; Sinhalese: -වු), or a final consonant without a following vowel. The sound pronounced as //ha// is always stressed in nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, and so is not pronounced pronounced as //hə// except in the word Sinhala; Sinhalese: හතලිහ pronounced as //ˈhat̪əlihə// ("forty"), where the initial pronounced as //ha// is stressed and the final pronounced as //hə// is unstressed.[29]
Nasalisation of vowels is common in certain environments, particularly before a prenasalised consonant. Nasalised pronounced as //ãː// and pronounced as //æ̃ː// exist as marginal phonemes, only present in certain interjections.[27]
Native Sinhalese words are limited in syllable structure to (C)V(C), V̄, and CV̄(C), where V is a short vowel, V̄ is a long vowel, and C is a consonant. Exceptions exist for the marginal segment CC. Prenasalised plosives are restricted to occurring intervocalically, and cannot end a syllable. Much more complicated consonant clusters are allowed in loan words, particularly from Sanskrit and English, an example being Sinhala; Sinhalese: ප්රශ්නය ("question").[30] Words cannot end in nasals other than .[31] Because of historical loss of the fricative in the suffix, at the end of a word behaves as its own syllable.[32]
The main features marked on Sinhala nouns are case, number, definiteness and animacy.
Sinhala distinguishes several cases. The five primary cases are the nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and ablative. Some scholars also suggest that it has a locative and instrumental case. However, for inanimate nouns the locative and genitive, and instrumental and ablative, are identical. In addition, for animate nouns these cases formed by placing ("with the hand") and ("near") directly after the nominative.
The brackets with most of the vowel length symbols indicate the optional shortening of long vowels in certain unstressed syllables.
| animate | inanimate | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| singular | plural | singular | plural | ||
| nominative | miniha(ː) | minissu | potə | pot | |
| accusative | miniha(ː)və | minissu(nvə) | |||
| dative | miniha(ː)ʈə | minissu(ɳ)ʈə | potəʈə | potvələʈə | |
| genitive | miniha(ː)ge(ː) | minissu(ŋ)ge(ː) | pote(ː) | potvələ | |
| locative | miniha(ː) laᵑgə | minissu(n) laᵑgə | |||
| ablative | miniha(ː)geŋ | minissu(n)geŋ | poteŋ | potvaliŋ | |
| instrumental | miniha(ː) atiŋ | minissu(n) atiŋ | |||
| vocative | miniho(ː) | minissuneː | - | - | |
| Gloss | 'man' | 'men' | 'book' | 'books' | |
Forming plurals in Sinhala is unpredictable. 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 disfixation. 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 | potə | reddə | kantoːruvə | satiyə | bus ekə | paːrə | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PL | amməla(ː) | deviyo(ː) | horu | pot | redi | kantoːru | sati | bus | paːrəval | |
| Gloss | 'mother(s)' | 'god(s)' | 'thie(f/ves)' | 'book(s)' | 'cloth(es)' | 'office(s)' | 'week(s)' | 'bus(es)' | '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". [+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.
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.
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 | ||||
There is a four-way deictic system (which is rare): There are four demonstrative stems (see demonstrative pronouns):
Sinhalese has an all-purpose odd suffix which when suffixed to a pronoun creates a formal and respectful tone in reference to a person. This is usually used in referring to politicians, nobles, and priests.
e.g. (Sinhala; Sinhalese: ඔබ තුමා) - you (vocative, when addressing a minister, high-ranking official, or generally showing respect in public etc.)
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.
In informal contexts, Sinhala slang may be integrated into the vocabulary used.