Pin It

Sinhalese language

Rudra | Jan 17, 2011 |

0 Comments | Rating: 0

Sri Lanka has two official languages and Sinhala is one of these. The language was developed almost independent from that of other Indo-Aryan languages. Generally, the tongue of the native mainland will influence a nation. However, Sri Lanka that was occupied by colonist from North India failed to make touch with the mainland India's tongue. Buddhist occupation all over the nation made Pali very famous and this Sinhalese seems to have a touch from Pali. A little sway of Sanskrit is also familiar in this language. Some call it as the Sinhalese or the Singhalese. It is recently called as Sinhala Tamil. Since Tamil Nadu was the closest state to Sri Lanka and there is lot of possibilities that Tamils settled in Sri Lanka, Sinhalese had its influence from Tamil too.

The Script of Sinhala is close to the Divehi language of Maldives Islands. Divehi follows the Tana script, which is a blend of Indic and Semitic culture. Both the Sinhala script and the Tana script resemble so closely that Divehi is called as the sibling of the Sinhala language. The closeness of the Sinhala language to the Tamil language makes people believe that Sinhala people belong to the Dravidian group. This assumption is quite wrong. Other neighboring languages of the Sinhala Language are the African, Polynesian, Malay, Dutch, English and the Portuguese. The written script of the Sinhala language is from left to write with no capital letters.

The spoken form of the Sinhala language has 14 vowels most of them borrowed from the forth-mentioned neighboring languages. Half of the vowels are short and the other half are long. However, this language has two unique vowels with the representation as "æ" and "æ:" This seems so intriguing, but the German predicted that these could be the influence of the umlaut. In a similar way, there are four consonants among the existing 26 consonants, which are unique to the Sinhala language. These are said to have their origin from the African languages. Many researchers say that none of these four occurs in any of the South Asian languages, but they do have their traces in Maldivian.

The protocol of the language Sinhala follows the same rules as that of all other Asian languages. The sentences are of the form Subject-Object and verb. The subject and verb should agree to the gender and case. This specific protocol is followed only while writing and not while speaking.

The Sinhala language has a great cultural heritage as far as music is concerned. Sinhala folk music are composed and used in Buddhist temples. In recent years a lot of modern Sinhalese or Sinhala songs have become popular not only in Sri Lanka but also neighboring countries such as India and smaller islands.