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The Tamil language is spoken by native Sri Lankan Tamils and is also spoken by Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka and by most Sri Lankan Moors. Tamil speakers number around 4.8 million (29% of the population), making it the second largest language in Sri Lanka. There are more than 40,000 speakers of the Sri Lankan Malay language.
Sinhala and Tamil are the official languages of Sri Lanka, with English as the link language. Tamil is a South-Dravidian language, and Sinhala belongs to the Insular Indic family (along with Dhivehi of the Maldives). Vedda is said to be the indigenous language of Sri Lanka before the arrival of the Indo-Aryans and Dravidians.
Sri Lanka, [a] historically known as Ceylon, [b] and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an island country in South Asia. It lies in the Indian Ocean , southwest of the Bay of Bengal , separated from the Indian peninsula by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait .
The language has two main varieties, written and spoken, and is a notable example of the linguistic phenomenon known as diglossia. [7] 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. [1]
The early form of the language was brought to Sri Lanka by the ancestors of the Sinhalese people from northern India who settled on the island in the sixth century BCE. [ 55 ] [ 56 ] Sinhala developed in a way different from the other Indo-Aryan languages because of the geographic separation from its Indo-Aryan sister languages.
العربية; Aragonés; Asturianu; Azərbaycanca; تۆرکجه; বাংলা; Башҡортса; Беларуская; Беларуская ...
The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. [1] [2] The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (in descending order) Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions.
Hindi is one of the two official union languages of India alongside English. Hindi and Urdu (both registers of Hindustani language) are official languages along with 20 others under the Eighth Schedule of Constitution of India. Pakistan: Asia 220,892,331 [2] Urdu is co-official with English. South Africa: Africa 59,622,350 [3]