Sinhala survival kit

About this kit

Sinhala is spoken by around 20 million people in Sri Lanka, including 18 million as a first language. An Indo-Aryan language written in its own Brahmic alphabet, it is one of the island's two official languages alongside Tamil. From Colombo to Kandy, from Galle to Jaffna: with this kit, you have the bare minimum to get by at the airport, in a tuk-tuk, at a restaurant and in case of trouble.

Sinhala is one of Sri Lanka's two official languages, spoken by around 20 million people including 18 million as a first language. It is an Indo-Aryan language of the southern branch, geographically isolated from its northern Indian cousins, which has allowed it to develop original features: prenasalized consonants rare in the family, loss of aspiration distinctions inherited from Sanskrit, subject-object-verb (SOV) word order typical of left-branching languages. Sinhala is written in its own Brahmic alphabet, the Sinhala script, whose elegant curves derive from Brahmi writing via a long passage through southern Indian scripts. It is an abugida: consonants carry an inherent vowel "a", modifiable by diacritics. The language has a marked diglossia between an archaic literary variety and a simpler spoken variety, which can surprise learners. Beyond the language, Sri Lanka is a garden island between tropical beaches, mountain forests (Knuckles, Horton Plains), tea plantations (Nuwara Eliya, Ella) and exceptional Buddhist heritage: Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Sigiriya Rock, Dambulla, the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. The cuisine is famed for its rice and curry, hoppers, kothu rotti, Ceylon tea. This kit gathers the bare essentials to handle an arrival in Colombo, a tuk-tuk ride, a restaurant order, a medical emergency and a smooth departure. Memorize these expressions and your first contacts with Sri Lankans will be infinitely warmer.