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Sinhala

Sinhala

Summary

Sinhala is natively spoken by about 1.6 million people, primarily in Sri Lanka, where it is an official language. It is integral to Sinhalese cultural identity, known for its ancient Buddhist heritage, traditional dance forms like Kandyan dance, and festivals such as Sinhala New Year. Written in the Sinhala script, Sinhala grammar features a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, extensive use of postpositions, and a system of verb conjugations that indicate tense, aspect, and mood.

Stats

  • Language Family: Indo-European

  • Writing System: Sinhala

  • Writing System Type: Abugida

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: N

  • Morphology: Fusional

  • Cases: 5

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 0

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 2

  • Word Order: SOV

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 13

  • Number of Consonants: 26

Areas Where Spoken

  • Sri Lanka (official) (~ 74%) (~ 1.64 mil)

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