| Sinhala | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| සිංහල siṁhala | ||||||
| Spoken in | Sri Lanka | |||||
| Native speakers | 15.6 million (2007) | |||||
| Language family | ||||||
| Writing system | Sinhala script (developed from the Brahmi) | |||||
| Official status | ||||||
| Official language in | Sri Lanka | |||||
| Regulated by | Not regulated | |||||
| Language codes | ||||||
| ISO 639-1 | si | |||||
| ISO 639-2 | sin | |||||
| ISO 639-3 | sin | |||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
Sinhala (සිංහල, ISO 15919: siṁhala, pronounced [ˈsiŋɦələ], sometimes referred by alternative spelling Singhalese), also known as Helabasa, is the mother tongue of the Sinhalese people, who make up the largest ethnic group in Sri Lanka, numbering about 15 million. Sinhala is also spoken by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, totalling about 3 million.[1] It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Sinhala is the official and national language of Sri Lanka.
Sinhala has its own writing system (see Sinhala alphabet) which is a member of the Brahmic family of scripts, and a descendant of the ancient Indian Brahmi script.
The oldest Indian Prakrit inscriptions found are from the 6th century BCE, on pottery;[2] the oldest existing literary works date from the 9th century CE.
The close relatives of Sinhala are the Vedda language of the Indigenous tribes of Sri Lanka, the language of the Maldives and Minicoy Island (India), Dhivehi.
Contents |
Sinhala (Siṃhāla) is actually a Sanskrit term; the corresponding Middle Indic word is Sīhala; the actual Sinhala term is Hela* (also Elu, Helu). The Sanskrit and the Middle Indic words have as their first element (siṃha and sīha) the word "lion" in the respective languages.[3] Thomas Burrow, argued that the word was likely to have been Dravidian in origin. He suggests that Dravidian word "Eelam" (or Cilam) meaning "toddy", referring to the palm trees in Sri Lanka was later absorbed into Indo-Aryan languages. This, he says, is also likely to have been the source for the Pali '"Sihala".[4]
It is believed that about the 5th century BCE, settlers from North-Eastern India [5] reached the island of Sri Lanka. According to the chronicle Mahavamsa, the first settlers were Prince Vijaya and his entourage. The settlers merged with the native Hela tribes known as Yakka and Naga who spoke the Elu language, and a new language called Sinhala came to exist.[6] In the following centuries, there was substantial immigration from Eastern India-Bengal (Kalinga, Magadha)[7] which led to an admixture of features of Eastern Prakrits.
The development of the Sinhala language is divided into four periods:
The most important phonetic developments of the Sinhala language include
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 viṃśati "twenty", Sinhala visi-, Hindi bīs). 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 mässā ("fly") and mäkkā ("flea"), which both correspond to Sanskrit makṣikā but stem from two regionally different Prakrit words macchiā and makkhikā (as in Pali).
In 1956 Sinhala replaced English as the official language. This has historically been viewed by academics as a key point in the development of ethnic discontent between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils. It was implemented by the Sri Lankan Freedom Party as one of its first acts in government and was perceived by the Tamils as a part of a strategy of placing "Sinhalese culture, language, and religion (Buddhism) to a position of dominance in the society" (Baxter, 2002, p. 354).[8]
According to Geiger, Sinhalese language has features that set it apart from other Indo-Aryan languages. Some of the differences can be explained by the substrate influence of parent stock of the Vedda language.[9] Sinhalese has many words that are only found in Sinhalese, or shared between Sinhalese and Vedda and not etymologically derivable from Middle or Old Indo-Aryan. Common examples are Kola for leaf in Sinhalese and Vedda, Dola for pig in Sinhalese and offering in Vedda. Other common words are Rera for wild duck, and Gala for stones (in toponyms used throughout the island).[10] There are also high frequency words denoting body parts in Sinhalese such as Olluva for head, Kakula for leg, Bella for neck and Kalava for thighs that are derived from pre-Sinhalese languages of Sri Lanka.[11] The author of the oldest Sinhalese grammar, Sidatsangarava, written in the 13th century CE, recognized a category of words that exclusively belonged to early Sinhalese. The grammar lists naramba (to see) and kolamba (fort or harbor) as belonging to an indigenous source. Kolamba is the source of the name of the commercial capital Colombo.[12][13]
Sinhala has been heavily influenced by Dravidian; relevant examples include:
| ēka | aluth | kiyalā | mama | dannawā |
| it | new | having-said | I | know |
"I know that it is new."
| ēka | aluth-da | kiyalā | mama | dannē | nähä |
| it | new-? | having-said | I | know | not |
"I do not know whether it is new."
As a result of centuries of colonial rule, contemporary Sinhala contains many Portuguese, Dutch and English loanwords.
Macanese language or Macau Creole (known as Patuá to its speakers) is a creole language derived mainly from Malay, Sinhalese, Cantonese, and Portuguese, which was originally spoken by the Macanese community 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 whom often married women from Malacca and Sri Lanka rather than from neighboring China, so the language had strong Malay and Sinhalese influence from the beginning.
Sinhala shares many features common to other Indo-European languages. Shared vocabulary includes the numbers up to ten:
| Numeral | Sinhala | Konkani | Sanskrit | Telugu | Greek | Latin | Portuguese | German | English | French | Russian | Latvian |
| 1 | eka (එක) | eka | éka | okati (ఒకటి) | heis | unus | um | eins | one | un | odin | viens |
| 2 | deka (දෙක) | don | dvá | rendu (రెండు) | dúo | duo | dois | zwei | two | deux | dva | divi |
| 3 | thuna (තුන) | theen | trí | moodu (మూడు) | treis | tres | três | drei | three | trois | tri | trīs |
| 4 | hathara (හතර) | chaar | chatúr | naalugu (నాలుగు) | téttares | quattuor | quatro | vier | four | quatre | chetyre | četri |
| 5 | paha (පහ) | panch | páñca | ídu (ఐదు) | pénte | quinque | cinco | fünf | five | cinq | pyat' | pieci |
| 6 | haya (හය) | sa | shat | aaru (ఆరు) | héx | sex | seis | sechs | six | six | shest' | seši |
| 7 | hatha (හත) | saath | saptá | yedu (ఏడు) | heptá | septem | sete | sieben | seven | sept | sem' | septiņi |
| 8 | ata (අට) | aat | aṣṭá | yenimidi (ఎనిమిది) | októ | octo | oito | acht | eight | huit | vosem' | astoņi |
| 9 | navaya (නවය) formal namaya (නමය) contemporary spoken |
nav | náva | tommidi (తొమ్మిది) | ennéa | novem | nove | neun | nine | neuf | devyat' | deviņi |
| 10 | dahaya (දහය) | dha | dáça | padi (పది) | déka | decem | dez | zehn | ten | dix | desyat' | desmit |
Sinhalese spoken in the Southern province of Sri Lanka (Galle, Matara and Hambantota districts) uses several words that are not found elsewhere in the country; this is also the case for the Central province, North-Central province and south-eastern part (Uva & the surrounding area). For native speakers all dialects are mutually intelligible, and they might not even realize that the differences are significant.[14]
The language of the Veddah people resembles Sinhala to a great extent, although it has a large number of words which cannot be traced to another language. Rodiya people use another dialect of Sinhala.
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 Sinhala slang and colloquialism). As a rule the literary language uses more Sanskrit-based words.
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.
The Sinhala alphabet, Sinhala hodiya, is based on ancient Brahmi, as are most Indo-Aryan scripts. In design, the Sinhala alphabet is what is called an "abugida" or "alphasyllabary", meaning that consonants are written with letters while vowels are indicated with diacritics (pilla) on those consonants, unlike English where both consonants and vowels are full letters, or Urdu where vowels need not be written at all. Also, when no diacritic is used, an "inherent vowel", either /a/ or /ə/, is understood, depending on the position of the consonant within the word. For example, the letter ක k on its own indicates ka, either /ka/ or /kə/. The various vowels are written කා kā, කැ kä, කෑ kǟ (after the consonant), කි ki, කී kī (above the consonant), කු ku, කූ kū (below the consonant), කෙ ke, කේ kē (before the consonant), කො ko, කෝ kō (surrounding the consonant). There are also a few diacritics for consonants, such as r. For simple /k/ without a vowel, a vowel-cancelling diacritic (virama) called hal kirīma is used: ක් k. Several of these diacritics occur in two forms, which depend 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 alphabet consist of 54 letters, 18 for vowels and 36 for consonants. However, only 36 (12 vowels and 24 consonants) are required for writing colloquial spoken Sinhala (suddha Sinhala). The rest indicate sounds that have gotten lost in the course of linguistic change, such as the aspirates, are restricted to Sanskrit and Pali loan words.
Sinhala is written from left to right and the Sinhala character set (the Sinhala script) is only used for this one language. The alphabetic sequence is similar to those of other Brahmic scripts:
| Labial | Dental/ Alveolar |
Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n̪ | ɳ | ɲ | ŋ | ||
| Stop | voiceless | p | t̪ | ʈ | tʃ | k | |
| voiced | b | d̪ | ɖ | dʒ | ɡ | ||
| prenasalized | ᵐb | ⁿ̪d̪ | ᶯɖ | ᵑɡ | |||
| Fricative | (f) | s | (ʃ) | h | |||
| Rhotic | r | ||||||
| Approximant | ʋ | l | j | ||||
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| long | short | long | short | long | short | |
| Close | iː | i | uː | u | ||
| Mid | eː | e | (ə) | oː | o | |
| Open | æː | æ | aː | a | ||
The main features marked on Sinhala nouns are case, number, definiteness and animacy.
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, atiŋ and laᵑgə, 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.
| animate sg | inanimate sg | animate pl | inanimate pl | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NOM | miniha(ː) | potə | minissu | pot |
| ACC | miniha(ː)və | potə | minissu(nvə) | pot |
| INSTR | miniha(ː) atiŋ | poteŋ | minissu(n) atiŋ | potvəliŋ |
| DAT | miniha(ː)ʈə | potəʈə | minissu(ɳ)ʈə | potvələʈə |
| ABL | miniha(ː)geŋ | poteŋ | minissu(n)geŋ | potvaliŋ |
| GEN | miniha(ː)ge(ː) | pote(ː) | minissu(ŋ)ge(ː) | potvələ |
| LOC | miniha(ː) laᵑgə | pote(ː) | minissu(n) laᵑgə | potvələ |
| VOC | miniho(ː) | - | minissuneː | - |
| Gloss | man | book | men | books |
In Sinhala animate nouns, the plural is marked with -o(ː), a long consonant plus -u, or with -la(ː). Most of the inanimates mark the plural by subtractive morphology. Loan words from English mark the singular with ekə, and do not mark the plural. This can be interpreted as singulative.
| SG | ammaː | deviyaː | horaː | potə | reddə | kantoːruvə | satiyə | bas ekə | paːrə |
| PL | amməla(ː) | deviyo(ː) | horu | pot | redi | kantoːru | sati | bas | paːrəval |
| Gloss | mother(s) | god(s) | thief(ves) | book(s) | cloth(es) | office(s) | week(s) | bus(ses) | 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". 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.
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 / ara ara(spoken) | / | pipenə pipenə/ pipi pipi(spoken) | / |
| infinitive | kannə/kanḍə | / | arinnə/arinḍə | / | pipennə/pipenḍə | / |
| emphatic form | kanneː | / | arinneː | / | pipenneː | / |
| gloss | eat | / | open | / | blossom | / |
Example: The sentence [koɦed̪ə ɡie], literally "where went", can mean "where did I/you/he/she/we... go".
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||