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English, Sinhala and Tamil languages on a war grave memorial plate in Kandy. (click to see full view of memorial plate) English in Sri Lanka is fluently spoken by approximately 23.8% [4] of the population, and widely used for official and commercial purposes. It is the native language of approximately 74,000 people, mainly in urban areas.
As Tamil is a diglossic language the differences between the standard written languages across the globe is minimal but the spoken varieties differ considerably. The spoken Tamil varieties in Sri Lanka although different from those of Tamil Nadu in India share some common features with the southern dialects of Tamil Nadu.
Sri Lankan Tamil dialects are distinct from the Tamil dialects used in Tamil Nadu, India.They are used in Sri Lanka and in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora.Linguistic borrowings from European colonizers such as the Portuguese, English and the Dutch have also contributed to a unique vocabulary that is distinct from the colloquial usage of Tamil in the Indian mainland.
In spite of the continual contact with India by sea, Sri Lankan Tamils have over the centuries become a distinct people developing dialects that differ in several aspects from the Indian Tamil dialects. [5] The Jaffna Tamil dialect is also distinct to a lesser extent from that of the Eastern, Western and Upcountry Tamil dialects of Sri Lanka. [6]
Sri Lankan English (SLE) is the English language as it is used in Sri Lanka, a term dating from 1972. [1] Sri Lankan English is principally categorised as the Standard Variety and the Nonstandard Variety, which is called as "Not Pot English". The classification of SLE as a separate dialect of English is controversial.
Bharatha People (Sinhala: භාරත, romanized: Bhārata, Tamil: பரதர், romanized: Paratar) also known as Bharatakula and Paravar, is an ethnicity in the island of Sri Lanka. [2] Earlier considered a caste of the Sri Lankan Tamils, they were classified as separate ethnic group in the 2001 census. [3]
"Sri Lanka Thaaye", the Tamil version of the Sri Lankan national anthem, is an exact translation of "Sri Lanka Matha", the Sinhala version, and has the same music. [27] Although it has existed since independence in 1948 it was generally only sung in the north and east of the country where the Tamil language predominates. [27]
Tamil loanwords in Sinhala can appear in the same form as the original word (e.g. akkā), but this is quite rare.Usually, a word has undergone some kind of modification to fit into the Sinhala phonological (e.g. paḻi becomes paḷi(ya) because the sound of /ḻ/, [], does not exist in the Sinhala phoneme inventory) or morphological system (e.g. ilakkam becomes ilakkama because Sinhala ...