| Group | Indic (with Sanskrit, Pali etc.), New Indic (with Marathi, Punjabi etc.) |
| Geography & History | The official language of Sri Lanka, Singhalese was spoken on the island of Ceylon for ages and goes back to the Singhalese Prakrit language represented by a number of rock inscriptions from the 3rd century. The Old Singhalese language existed from the 4th to the 8th century, Middle Singhalese - up to the 13th century; documents in both of them are not numerous. In the 13th century the fundamental grammar of Singhalese was written, this marked the start of the literature language which existed right until the 19th century. Since then, a new form of the written language is forming based on the colloquial speech. Today about 12 million people speak it. |
| Phonetics | Singhalese, despite the general trend of all Indic languages, has preserved the length of vowels. The system of consonants includes semi-nasal ones which are found next to voiced ones only; cerebral and aspirated stops also exist, though the latter disappear in the spoken language. Indic palatals become s, d, t. |
| Morphology | Morphology includes strong elements of agglutination and the newly appearing inflections. Nouns are declined, adjectives, on the other hand, have no gender, case or number. The verb preserves all the major categories of the Old Indic structure: it has two genders (common and feminine), person, number, tense, mood. The ablaut in the root still plays a vital role. |
| Writing | Granthi script |
| Close Contacts | The history of Ceylon has left numerous borrowed items in the Singhalese vocabulary: first of all from the Tamil language still spoken on the island; later from English and Portuguese, Malayan and Persian. The closest relative within the group is the Maldivian language. |
| Sample | |
| Picture | |
| More info |