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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.
During the British colonial era, English was the official language in Ceylon (known as Sri Lanka since 1972). Until the passage of the Free Education Bill in 1944, education in the English language was the preserve of the Sri Lankan elite and the ordinary people had little knowledge of it.
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 Sri Lankan Tamil dialects or Ceylon Tamil or commonly in Tamil language Eelam Tamil (Tamil: ஈழத் தமிழ், īḻat tamiḻ) are a group of Tamil dialects used in Sri Lanka by its native Tamil speakers that are distinct from the Tamil dialects spoken in Tamil Nadu.
Sri Lankan Malays first settled in the country in 200 B.C., when the Austronesian expansion reached the island of Sri Lanka from Maritime Southeast Asia (which includes peoples as diverse as Sumatrans to Lucoes) and brought speakers of the Malayo-Polynesian language group to Sri Lankan shores. [9]
Ceylon was used until it was replaced by Sri Lanka in 1972; the honorific Sri has been added to Lanka, a place mentioned in ancient texts and assumed to refer to the country between the 10th [7] and the 12th centuries CE. [3] Other ancient names used to refer to Sri Lanka included Serendip in Persian, Turkic (Serendib/Särändib) and Eelam in ...
Sri Lanka Indo-Portuguese, Ceylonese Portuguese Creole or Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole (SLPC) is a language spoken in Sri Lanka.While the predominant languages of the island are Sinhala and Tamil, the interaction of the Portuguese and the Sri Lankans led to the evolution of a new language, Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole (SLPC), which flourished as a lingua franca on the island for over 350 years ...