Sinhala

Sinhala is the Indo-Aryan language of the Sinhalese, the majority people of Sri Lanka; with Maldivian of the Maldives it forms the Insular Indo-Aryan group, both descending from the ancient Elu Prakrit. The chronicle Mahavamsa traces them to settlers from eastern India's Kalinga and Magadha, and the earliest records are third-century-BCE rock inscriptions in a Prakrit close to Magadhi. Its history runs through four stages: Elu Prakrit until the fourth century CE, Proto-Sinhala until the eighth, medieval Sinhala until the thirteenth, and the modern stage thereafter. Contact with Tamil speakers and the island's Vedda people left a Dravidian and Vedda substrate. Its closest kin Maldivian, attested on twelfth-century copper plates, has used the Thaana script since the sixteenth century.

More than fifteen hundred verses on the mirror wall at Sigiriya, dated to the eighth through tenth centuries, are the only surviving poetry of the Anuradhapura age; the Kotte court that united the island in 1450 patronized the bird-named sandesha messenger poems of its monk-poets. Its Brahmi-derived abugida, akin to the Grantha script, also serves the liturgical Pali, and its literary and spoken registers differ sharply in a classic case of diglossia. Printing came under the Dutch: a Colombo press of 1734 issued Sinhala gospels, and British-era Bible societies produced fresh translations in 1823 and 1833.