Sinhala

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Sinhala Summary

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Sinhala

Sinhala is an old Indo-Aryan language spoken by 75 percent of the population of Sri Lanka. Its early history can be traced in Brahmi inscriptions from about 200 BCE. This "Sinhalese Prakrit" is related to north Indian dialects; Sinhalese legends and linguistic evidence suggest that settlers from north India brought their dialects with them before 500 BCE. Its isolation from other Indo-Aryan languages (except Divehi in the Maldive Islands) and long contact with Dravidian languages have given it a unique character.

History

Most early texts have been lost, but the evolution of Sinhala from Prakrit can be traced through numerous cave and rock inscriptions up to the twelfth century CE and Sinhala literature from the tenth century onward. Sinhala evolved by regular sound changes interrupted by periodic reforms and extensive borrowing from other languages. Sinhala eliminated aspirated consonants and the consonant r, reduced double consonants to single and diphthongs to vowels, and changed certain consonants (for example, j to d, p to v, and s to h).

Education and scholarship were in the hands of Buddhist monks, whose religious texts remained in Pali. The island had substantial scholarship in the Pali language, which encouraged borrowing. Sanskrit loan words were introduced in particular by Mahayana Buddhists and students of Sanskritic theories of poetics and rhetoric. Many Sanskrit words and idioms were added after the tenth century, and the literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has a high proportion of Sanskrit words.

Tamil influence on Sinhala has always been considerable, in vocabulary, idiom, and grammatical structure. The long interaction through migration and invasion from south India has created many loan words from Tamil, including kinship terms. Tamil probably also influenced the lack of aspirated stops, the contrast between short and long" vowels, and Sinhala's "left-branching" character (a modifier precedes that which it modifies).

Portuguese and Dutch conquest of the coasts led to extensive loan words. Many administrative institutions and domestic innovations, for example, have Portuguese terms; many legal terms are derived from the Dutch, who introduced Roman-Dutch law. The revival of Buddhism in the interior of the island in the eighteenth century was accompanied by a linguistic revival in which Buddhist monks revived classical literary forms and attempted to "purify" Sinhala. This revival persisted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under very different circumstances and resulted in today's literary Sinhala.

British colonial domination produced an English-speaking class of people who disparaged Sinhala (and Tamil), a situation that continued well into the postindependence period. In the nineteenth century, this meant that extensive changes in Sinhala took place with little influence from the politically and economically dominant Sinhalese leaders.

The Dutch introduced printing in Sinhala in 1737, but printed materials in Sinhala did not appear regularly until a century later, when British missionaries began publishing religious propaganda. The first Sinhalese-owned press began in about 1835. In the 1860s presses and newspapers published in Sinhala proliferated, and many old texts were reprinted. Writers struggled to decide what idiom of Sinhala to use in their works, torn between a colloquial idiom that would appeal to a wider audience and a literary idiom that would satisfy revivalists.

Education in Sinhala expanded dramatically in the nineteenth century through a system of government grants-in-aid. Most of the grants-in-aid were given to Christian missionary schools, as temple schools did not qualify under the government regulations. In addition, education in Sinhala was intended only to provide a cheap elementary education for the masses, not scholarly training. Thus Buddhist monks lost their traditional role as educators and public support for higher scholarship in Sinhala was lost.

Pamphleteers carried on acrimonious debates over language issues. Writers argued whether to use literary or colloquial forms and which literary forms to use. At one extreme, some wanted to restore Sanskrit and Pali terms used in older texts; at the other, some wanted not only to restore the so-called pure Sinhala (Elu) language from classical texts, but to apply the historical transformations to existing words to coin neologisms in pure Sinhala.

Diglossia

Written literature has diverged widely from colloquial Sinhala, producing the language situation of diglossia, in which the written and spoken languages have very different characteristics. Cornell linguist James W. Gair has argued that there are stable structural differences between literary Sinhala and spoken Sinhala, and within spoken Sinhala between formal and colloquial variants.

Literary Sinhala is characterized by such features as the distinction of masculine and feminine gender in animate nouns; person, number, and (in some tenses) gender distinctions in verbs; the agreement of verbs and subject; and the existence of a passive tense. None of these exists in colloquial Sinhala today and presumably did not in the earlier centuries. Many of these features are redundant, which makes literary Sinhala (except for the lexicon) possible to read without much training but difficult to write.

Colloquial Sinhala is the language of ordinary conversation; formal Sinhala is an intermediate form used on such occasions as public addresses, radio and television news broadcasts, university lectures, and sermons.

M. W. Sugathapala de Silva of the University of York disagreed with Gair's emphasis on the structural differences between these variants and stresses the continuity from one variety to another.

Independent Sri Lanka

English was the language of government, higher education, and the leading sectors of the economy until the Official Language Act of 1956 made Sinhala the official language. Since then there has been a progressive shift of the language of education and government to Sinhala. Many neologisms were coined in the process. These are a combination of new meanings for old words, words with Sanskritic origins, and loan words. The 1978 constitution made Tamil a national language and in 1988 an official language, but at the beginning of the new millennium, government offices increasingly required the public to transact its business in Sinhala.

There is a great deal of variation in the Sinhala one encounters in Sri Lanka today. Much of the vocabulary of literary and colloquial Sinhala is interchangeable, and individuals use varying amounts of literary vocabulary and loan words in their speech. Some words have synonyms that range from very literary to very colloquial; people seem to select their vocabulary according to the situation.

Since the outbreak of civil war in 1983, the replacement of both English-educated and Tamil-educated officials with Sinhala-educated ones has accelerated the use of literary Sinhala in government. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there continues to be an active attempt to replace Sanskritic terms with new ones derived from Elu, perhaps influenced by the Sinhalese nationalism that has burgeoned during the civil war.