Sinhala script

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The Sinhalese script, also called Sinhala script, is a writing system used to write the Sinhala language and also to write liturgical languages like Pali and Sanskrit. It is an abugida in the Brahmic family, descended from the ancient Brahmi script and influenced by Grantha. It likely arrived in Sri Lanka from northern India around the 3rd century BCE and developed over many centuries.

Key points about its history
- The oldest surviving literature in Sinhala dates from around the 9th century CE. By then, the script was widely used for different kinds of writing, including Buddhist texts in Pali.
- Modern Sinhala started to take shape in the 13th century, and a classic grammar book from around 1300 AD helped standardize it.
- In 1736, the Dutch began printing with Sinhala type on the island. The early types were monolinear and didn’t separate words. In the second half of the 19th century, a high-contrast style with thicker strokes became the standard and is still used today.
- Today, more than 16 million people use Sinhala to read newspapers, books, signs, school materials, and more. Sinhala is the main language written in this script, though it has occasionally been used for Sri Lanka Malay.

What the script looks like and how it works
- Sinhala is an abugida, written left to right. Each consonant has an inherent vowel /a/, which can be changed with vowel marks (diacritics) placed before, after, above, or below the consonant.
- Vowels can also appear as independent letters when a word starts with a vowel.
- The letters are mostly curvy, with very few straight lines, a design influenced by writing on palm leaves. There are no uppercase letters and no joining of letters in words.
- A hal kirīma mark can remove the inherent vowel from a consonant.
- Some consonant combinations are written in ligatures (special joined forms).
- There are two main sets of letters:
- śuddha siṃhala (the pure Sinhala alphabet), which covers modern Sinhala sounds.
- miśra siṃhala (mixed Sinhala), which includes extra letters for sounds from historical stages or loanwords (Sanskrit, Pali, or English). Modern Sinhala mainly uses the śuddha set.
- Vowels include both short and long forms, and there are a few special diacritics that change shape in certain combinations.
- Numbers once used in Sinhala (illakkam) had no zero and were replaced by Hindu-Arabic numerals. A traditional system called Sinhala lith illakkam was used for a long time and is still seen in horoscopes and some older texts. The punctuation mark kunddaliya (like a period) is not commonly used today.

Pali, Sanskrit, and other uses
- Sinhala script has long been used for many Pali texts, including copies of the Pali Tripitaka. The script adapts to represent Pali sounds that Sinhala itself doesn’t commonly use, especially aspirates and certain consonants. Some Pali spellings are written with older or mixed letters.

Unicode, fonts, and computing
- Sinhala was added to the Unicode Standard in 1999 (version 3.0). The main Sinhala block is U+0D80 to U+0DFF.
- A separate Sinhala Archaic Numbers block (U+111E0 to U+111FF) was added in 2014 (Unicode 7.0).
- In computing, Sinhala support has improved a lot:
- Windows 10 and later include Sinhala by default; Nirmala UI is a common Sinhala font.
- macOS (from Catalina onward) includes Sinhala support.
- Linux uses input systems like IBus or SCIM with several keymaps.
- Android supports Sinhala rendering and input, with apps like Helakuru providing keyboards.
- For transliteration, there are common patterns in converting Sinhala to Roman letters, but different users may spell sounds differently in English.

In short, Sinhala script is a historic, curved, left-to-right Brahmic writing system used mainly for Sinhala today, with a legacy of Pali and Sanskrit texts. It has evolved from palm-leaf writing to modern digital texts and is supported across today’s computers and devices.