In English language there are vowels and consonants. Likewise, in Sinhala also there are vowels and consonants. The difference is that in Sinhala all the vowels appear in the beginning and the consonants form another group. The standard Sinhala alphabet has 15 vowels and 42 consonants, and a few other symbols.
Let's start with vowels.
In Sinhalese, there are 18 vowels sound. However, only 16 vowels are required for writing colloquial spoken Sinhala (suddha Sinhala). Out of those 16 vowels, seven of them are short and other seven are long. Remaining two of these vowels are unique to the language and are represented as “æ“ and “æ:”. The vowels in Sinhala can be further broken down as dependent or independent vowels. Below is comprehensive list of vowels:
In Sinhalese, there are 42 consonants sound. However, only 41 consonants are required for writing colloquial spoken Sinhala (suddha Sinhala). The rest of the sound are load word from either Sanskrit and Pali and have been added into Sinhala in the course of linguistic change. Those consonants are:
Sinhala in the present day uses numerals which were introduced by Portuguese, Dutch and English after 1505 AD.
Sinhala (සිංහල, ˈsɪnhələ, ˈsɪŋələ), also spelled Singhalese or Cingalese, is an official and national language of Sri Lanka. It is spoken by over 16 million native speaker and additional 2 million as a secondary language.
| Pronunciation: | [ˈsiŋɦələ] |
| Native Name: | Sinhala (සිංහල) |
| Number of Speakers: | 20 million |
| Language family: | Indo-Aryan |
| Ethnicity: | Sinhalese People |
| Writing System: | Sinhala Script |
| Spoken in: | Sri Lanka |
| Status: | Official Language in Sri Lanka |
| Two digit language code (ISO 639-1): | si |
Below is a list of complete Sinhala Alphabets Chart