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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 Maldives). Vedda is said to be the indigenous language of Sri Lanka before the arrival of the Indo-Aryans and Dravidians.
[4] [1] It is also the first language of about 2 million other Sri Lankans, as of 2001. [5] It is written in the Sinhala script, a Brahmic script closely related to the Grantha script of South India. [6] The language has two main varieties, written and spoken, and is a notable example of the linguistic phenomenon known as diglossia. [7]
Official language A language designated as having a unique legal status in the state: typically, the language used in a nation's legislative bodies, and often, official government business. Regional language A language designated as having official status limited to a specific area, administrative division, or territory of the state.
The Ministry of National Co-existence Dialogue and Official Languages (formerly the Ministry of National Languages and Social Integration) (Sinhala: ජාතික සහජීවනය, සංවාද හා රාජ්ය භාෂා අමාත්යාංශය Jāthika Sahajeewanaya, Sangwāda hā Rājya Bhāsha Amathyanshaya; Tamil: தேசிய சகவாழ்வு ...
Sinhala is a Unicode block containing characters for the Sinhala and Pali languages of Sri Lanka, and is also used for writing Sanskrit in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala allocation is loosely based on the ISCII standard, except that Sinhala contains extra prenasalized consonant letters, leading to inconsistencies with other ISCII-Unicode script allocations.
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 ...
Pages in category "Languages of Sri Lanka" The following 17 pages are in this category, out of 17 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. ...