Sinhalese language

Sinhalese
සිංහල sinhala
Region	Sri Lanka
Native speakers	16 million (2007) 2 million second language (1997)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Southern Zone Sinhalese
Early forms	Elu Sinhalese
Dialects	Vedda (perhaps a creole)
Writing system	Sinhala alphabet Sinhalese Braille (Bharati Braille)
Official status
Official language in	Sri Lanka
Language codes
ISO 639-1	si
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	sinh1246
Linguasphere	59-ABB-a

Sinhalese (/sɪnəˈliːz/), known natively as Sinhala (Sinhalese: සිංහල; singhala [ˈsiŋɦələ]), is the native language of the Sinhalese people, who make up the largest ethnic group in Sri Lanka, numbering about 16 million. Sinhalese is also spoken as a second language by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, totalling about four million. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Sinhalese has its own writing system, the Sinhalese alphabet, which is one of the Brahmic scripts, a descendant of the ancient Indian Brahmi script closely related to the Kadamba alphabet.

Sinhalese is one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka. Sinhalese, along with Pali, played a major role in the development of Theravada Buddhist literature.

The oldest Sinhalese Prakrit inscriptions found are from the third to second century BCE following the arrival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, the oldest existing literary works date from the ninth century. The closest relative of Sinhalese is the language of the Maldives and Minicoy Island (India), the Maldivian language.