Sinhalese or Sinhala (?????, ISO 15919: , , earlier referred to as Singhalese) is the language of the Sinhalese, the largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages.

Sinhala is spoken by about 19 million people in Sri Lanka, about 16 million of whom are native speakers. It is one of the constitutionally-recognised official languages of Sri Lanka, along with Tamil. Sinhala has its own writing system (see Sinhala alphabet) which is an offspring of the Brahmi script.

The oldest Sinhala inscriptions were written in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE; the oldest existing literary works date from the 9th century CE.

The closest relative of Sinhala is the language of the Maldives, Dhivehi.

Etymology

Sinhala (actually Sanskrit) and the corresponding Middle Indic term S?hala have as their first element (si?ha/s?ha) the word "lion" in the respective languages. According to legend, Sinhabahu or S?hab?hu ("Lion-arms"), was the son of a Vanga princess and a lion. He killed his father and became king of Vanga. His son Vijaya would emigrate to Lank? and become the progenitor of the Sinhala people. Taking into account linguistic and mythological evidence, we can assume that the first element of the name of the people means "lion".^[1]

As for the second element la, local tradition connects it to the Sanskrit root l?- "to seize",^[2] as to translate it "lion-seizer" or "lion-killer", or to Sanskrit loha/Sinhala l? "blood", to have it mean "lion blood". From a linguistic point of view however, neither interpretation is convincing , so that we can only safely say that the word Sinhala is somehow connected to a term meaning "lion".

History

About the 5th century BCE, settlers from North-Western India reached the island of Sri Lanka, bringing with them an Indo-Aryan language. (This first group of settlers is referred to as prince Vijaya and his entourage in the chronicle Mahavamsa.) In the following centuries, there was substantial immigration from North-Eastern India (Kalinga, Magadha) which led to an admixture of features of Eastern Prakrits.

Stages of historical development

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

• Sinhala Prakrit (until 3rd century CE)
• Proto-Sinhala (3rd - 7th century CE)
• Medieval Sinhala (7th - 12th century CE)
• Modern Sinhala (12th century - present)

Phonetic development

The most important phonetic developments of Sinhala language include

• the loss of the aspiration distinction in stops (e.g. kanav? "to eat" corresponds to Sanskrit kh?dati, Hindi kh?n?)
• the shortening of all long vowels (compare example above) [Long vowels in the modern language are due to borrowings (e.g. vib?gaya "exam" < Sanskrit vibh?ga) and sandhi phenomena either after elision of intervocalic consonants (e.g. d?nav? "to put" < damanav?) or in originally compound words.]
  • the simplification of consonant clusters and geminate consonants into geminates or single consonants respectively (e.g. Sanskrit "time" > Sinhala Prakrit > Modern Sinhala )
• development of /j/ to /d/ (e.g. däla "web" corresponds to Sanskrit j?la)

Western vs. Eastern Prakrit features

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

Ecology

Affinities to neighbouring languages

In addition to many Tamil loanwords, several phonetic and grammatical features present in neighbouring Dravidian languages, setting today's spoken Sinhala apart from its Northern Indo-Aryan siblings, bear witness to the close coexistence of the two groups of speakers. Some of the features that may be traced to Dravidian influence are

• the distinction between short e, o and long ?, ?
• the loss of aspiration
• left-branching syntax
• the use of the verbal adjective of kiyanav? "to say" as a subordinating conjunction with the meanings "that" and "if", e.g.:

"I know that it is new."

"I do not know whether it is new."

Foreign influences

Due to centuries of colonial rule, contemporary Sinhala contains many loanwords from Portuguese, Dutch and English.

Dialects

Sinhalese spoken in the Southern province of Sri Lanka (Galle, Matara and Hambantota districts) is highly divergent from that spoken in the Western and Central part. Often foreigners who learn the Western dialect (which is generally considered to be the standard language today) are unable to speak with people from the South. However, for native speakers both dialects are mutually intelligible.

The language of the Veddah resembles Sinhala to a great extent, although it has a large number of words which cannot be traced to another language.

Diglossia

In Sinhala 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 colloquialism).

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.

Sinhala language also has diverse slang. Some is regarded as taboo and most is frowned upon as non-scholarly.

There is presently no significant deviation of the Sinhala language between the Southern province and the Western one. Only a few different patterns of pronunciation exist.

Characteristics of spoken Sinhala

The Sinhala spoken language has the following characteristics:

Phonology

• The presence of so-called prenasalized stops. A very short homorganic nasal is added before a voiced 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.
• The pronunciation of unstressed short as schwa , which otherwise has no written symbol.

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, ati? and la^?g?, 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 grammaticalization 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.

Number marking

In Sinhala animate nouns, the plural is marked with -o(?), a long consonant plus -u, or with -la(?). Most of the inanimates mark the plural by subtractive morphology. Loan words from English mark the singular with ek?, and do not mark the plural. This can be interpreted as singulative.

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 pa?r? "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.

Syntax

• SOV (Subject Object Verb) word order.
• 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 , literally "books writing man".
• It is a left-branching language (see branching), which means that determining elements are usually put in front of what they determine (see example above).
• An exception to this is statements of quantity which usually stand behind what they define. Example: "the four flowers" translates to , 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"
• There are no prepositions, only postpositions (see Adposition). Example: "under the book" translates to , literally "book under".
• Sinhala has no copula: "I am rich" translates to , 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) "here, close to the speaker", "there, close to the person addressed", "there, close to a third person, visible" and "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".

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

Notes

References

• 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

• Guide to Sinhala language & Culture
• Let's Speak Sinhala - online lessons
• Sinhala Word Processor
• Online dictionary (Beta)
• Kapruka Sinhala dictionary
• Madhura Sinhala English Dictionary
• Sinhala dictionary (Beta)
• Sinhala books/novels
• Sinhala Slang

See also

• Elu

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