Sinhala language

Sinhala, 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. It is also the first language of about 2 million other Sri Lankans, as of 2001. It is written in the Sinhalese script, a Brahmic script closely related to the Grantha script of South India. The language has two main varieties, written and spoken, and is a notable example of the linguistic phenomenon known as diglossia.
Sinhala is one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka. Along with Pali, it played a major role in the development of Theravada Buddhist literature.
Early forms of the Sinhalese language are attested to as early as the 3rd century BCE. 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 spoken during the lifetime of the Buddha. The most closely related languages to Sinhalese are the Vedda language and the Maldivian languages; the former is an endangered indigenous creole still spoken by a minority of Sri Lankans, which mixes Sinhalese with an isolate of unknown origin. Old Sinhalese borrowed various aspects of Vedda into its main Indo-Aryan substrate.
File:Sigiriya-graffiti.jpg|thumb|There are 1,500 poems written in the 6th-10th centuries on the Sigiriya Mirror Wall. These poems are believed to have been composed by pilgrims who came to visit the Buddhist monastery of Sigiriya, which was active at this time.

Etymology

Sinhala is a Sanskrit term; the corresponding Middle Indo-Aryan word is Sīhala.
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.

History

According to the chronicle, written in Pali, Prince Vijaya of the Vanga Kingdom and his entourage merged in Sri Lanka with later settlers from the Pandya kingdom. In the following centuries, there was substantial immigration from Eastern India, including additional migration from the Vanga Kingdom, as well as Kalinga and Magadha. This influx led to an admixture of features of Eastern Prakrits.

Stages of historical development

The development of Sinhala is divided into four epochs:

Elu Prakrit
Proto-Sinhala
Medieval Sinhala
Modern Sinhala
Phonetic development

The most important phonetic developments of Sinhala include:

the loss of aspiration as a distinction for plosive consonants
the loss of original vowel length distinction; long vowels in the modern language are found in loanwords or as a result of sandhi, either after elision of intervocalic consonants or in originally compound words.
the simplification of consonant clusters and geminate consonants into geminates and single consonants respectively
development of to and/or and development of to
development of prenasalized consonants from Sanskrit nasal + voiced stops
retention of initial and, the latter only shared with Kashmiri
Western vs. Eastern Prakrit features

According to Wilhelm Geiger, an example of a possible Western feature in Sinhala is the retention of initial which developed into in the Eastern languages. This is disputed by Muhammad Shahidullah who says that Helu 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.
An example of an Eastern feature is the ending for masculine nominative singular in Helu. There are several cases of vocabulary doublets, one example being the words and , which both correspond to Sanskrit but stem from two regionally different Prakrit words and .

Pre-1815 Sinhalese literature

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

Substratum influence in Sinhala

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, for pig in Vedda and offering in Sinhala. Other common words are for wild duck, and for stones. 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 known Sinhala grammar, Sidatsan̆garavā, written in the 13th century CE, recognised a category of words that exclusively belonged to early Sinhala. The grammar lists and as belonging to an indigenous source. is the source of the name of the commercial capital Colombo.

South Dravidian substratum influence

The consistent left branching syntax and the loss of aspirated stops in Sinhala is attributed to a probable South Dravidian substratum effect. This has been explained by a period of prior bilingualism:

Influences from neighbouring languages

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:

the loss of aspiration
the use of the attributive verb of kiyana "to say" as a subordinating conjunction with the meanings "that" and "if", e.g.:
European influence

As a result of about 3 centuries of colonial rule, interaction, settlement and assimilation, modern Sinhala contains some Portuguese, Dutch and English loanwords.

Influences on other languages

or Macau Creole 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.

Accents and dialects

The Sinhala language has different types of variations which are commonly identified as dialects and accents. Among those variations, regional variations are prominent. Some of the well-known regional variations of Sinhala language are:

The Uva Province variation.
The southern variation.
The up-country variation.
The Sabaragamu variation.
Uva regional variation in relation to grammar

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,, or. But when it comes to Monaragala, the situation is somewhat different as when nouns are pluralized a nasal sound is added.

General way of pluralizing Sinhala words	The way Uva people pluralize words

Southern variation

The Kamath language used by the Southerners is somewhat different from the 'Kamath language' used in other parts 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.
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 they are referring to.

Kandy, Kegalle and Galle people

Even though the Kandy, Kegalle and Galle people pronounce words with slight differences, the Sinhalese can understand the majority of the sentences.

Diglossia

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.
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:

The copula ව‌ෙනවා, in equational sentences is required in literary but prohibited in spoken Sinhala.
The accusative and locative cases are missing in colloquial spoken Sinhala.