Sinhala Only Act

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The Sinhala Only Act was a law passed in the Sri Lankan parliament in 1956.

The law mandated Sinhala (the language spoken by Sinhalese people who compromise 74% of Sri Lanka's population), as the sole official language of Sri Lanka. Supporters of the law saw it as an attempt by a community that had just gained independence to distance themselves from their colonial masters, while its opponents viewed it as an attempt by the linguistic majority to impose its will on minorities.

1 British rule
2 Sri Lanka after independence
3 Notes
4 References

[edit] British rule

Under the British Empire, English was the language of rule in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon). Until the passage of the Free Education Bill in 1944, education in the English language was the preserve of the subaltern elite and the ordinary people had little knowledge of it. A disproportionate number of English-language schools were located in the mostly Tamil-speaking north. Thus, English-speaking Tamils held a higher percentage of coveted civil service jobs, which required English fluency, than their share of the island's population.

After their election to the State Council in 1936, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) members N.M. Perera and Philip Gunawardena demanded the replacement of English as the official language by Sinhala and Tamil. In November 1936, a motion that 'in the Municipal and Police Courts of the Island the proceedings should be in the vernacular' and that 'entries in police stations should be recorded in the language in which they are originally stated' were passed by the State Council and referred to the Legal Secretary, but nothing was done about these matters and English continued to be the language of rule until 1956.

[edit] Sri Lanka after independence

Sri Lanka gained dominion status in 1948 with little armed liberation struggle, except for the incidents such as that at Wewessa Estate and the Cocos Islands Mutiny; the passage to sovereignty from the British to the Sri Lankan subaltern elite was a peaceful one. For the first years of independence there was an attempt to balance the interests of the elites of the main communities, the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Most Sinhalese did however harbour the view that the Tamils had enjoyed a privileged position under the British. This was mainly due to the British policy of "divide and rule".^[1] In 1949, with the concurrence of the leaders of the Ceylon Tamils, at the behest of the foreign plantation owners, the government disenfranchised the Indian Tamil plantation workers, who accounted for 10% of the population.^[2]^[3]

Before the 1956 parliamentary election the ambitious Solomon Bandaranaike had broken with his party, the UNP and created a new party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). The SLFP decided to break ranks with the general consensus on the Left to have both Sinhalese and Tamil as official languages and campaign on the slogan "Sinhala Only".

The result was electoral victory, and "The Ceylon (Constitution) Order in Council" or "Sinhala Only Bill" was quickly enacted after the election. The Left bitterly opposed it, with Dr N.M. Perera moving a motion in Parliament that the Act "should be amended forthwith to provide for the Sinhalese and Tamil languages to be state languages of Ceylon with parity of status throughout the Island."

Dr Colvin R de Silva of the LSSP responded: "Do we... want a single nation or do we want two nations? Do we want a single state or do we want two? Do we want one Ceylon or do we want two? And above all, do we want an independent Ceylon which must necessarily be united and single and single Ceylon, or two bleeding halves of Ceylon which can be gobbled up by every ravaging imperialist monster that may happen to range the Indian ocean? These are issues that in fact we have been discussing under the form and appearance of language issue." ^[4]

The passage of the law was met with demonstrations from Tamils, which were repressed, the most prominent by Tamil MPs on "Galle Face Green" in the centre of Colombo. By most Tamils the "Sinhala Only Act" was and is seen as a watershed and a foundation of the current civil war in the country. Parts of the law was reversed in 1958, after the so-called "Sinhala Only, Tamil Also" compromise by the middle-class Tamil leaders. The Left parties continued to demand parity of status until after the Tamil electorate voted overwhelmingly in the 1960 elections for the same leaders who had agreed to the compromise.

The law had its intended effect. In 1955 the civil service had been largely Tamil; by 1970 it was almost entirely Sinhalese, with thousands of Tamil civil servants forced to resign due to lack of fluency in Sinhala.^[5] For much of the 1960s government forms and services were virtually unavailable to Tamils, but this situation improved with later relaxations of the law.

Today, English remains the de facto language of rule - the business of government continues to be carried out in English, with the drafting of legislation being in English, although the law states that the Sinhala version should take preference.