Sinhala Alphabet & Letters

Sinhala (සිංහල) has a script of its own, a descendant of the ancient Brahmi script like the scripts of India, and recognisable at once by its round, looping letters. The usual explanation for the curves is that Sinhala was written for centuries with a stylus on palm leaves, where long straight strokes would split the leaf along its grain. Like the Indian scripts it is an abugida: a consonant on its own already includes the vowel a, so ක is read ka, and other vowels are added to it as signs called pilla (පිල්ල). The al-lakuna ් (hal kirīma) removes the vowel altogether: ක් is a bare k.

The alphabet children learn is called the hodiya (හෝඩිය). Its full modern form, the mixed or miśra alphabet, is usually given as 18 vowels and 41 consonants, with ං (anusvaraya or binduva, an ng sound) and ඃ (visargaya) as two extra signs. Native Sinhala words get by with far fewer letters: most of the aspirated consonants, ශ and ෂ, and the vowels ඍ ඎ ඏ ඐ came in with words from Sanskrit and from Pali, the language of Theravada Buddhist scripture, and ෆ was added for words from English such as ෆෝන් (phone).

The vowel signs on ක show how each one sits: කා කැ කෑ කි කී කු කූ කෘ කෙ කේ කෛ කො කෝ කෞ. The kombuva ෙ is written before the consonant, and in ො ෝ ෞ it wraps around it together with a second sign. In Unicode you always type the consonant first and the sign after it; the font moves the kombuva into place. The signs ු and ූ change shape after some letters, most visibly in රු (ru), the short form of the word for rupee.

ඇ, ඈ and the half-nasal letters: what is special about Sinhala letters

Sinhala has letters for the vowel of English cat, a sound most Indian scripts have no letter for: short ඇ and long ඈ, with the signs ැ and ෑ. They are everyday letters: ඇස (eye), ඈත (far), කෑම (food), සුබ උදෑසනක් (good morning).

The second Sinhala speciality is the sanyaka or half-nasal letters ඟ ඦ ඬ ඳ ඹ, a short nasal blended into the following stop, as in හඳ (handa, moon), අඹ (amba, mango) and ගඟ (ganga, river). They are written as one letter, unlike a full nasal plus consonant such as the න් + ද in කන්ද (kanda, hill). ඦ is the rarest of them and turns up mainly in alphabet charts.

The aspirated letters ඛ ඝ ඡ ඣ ඨ ඪ ථ ධ ඵ භ, along with ශ and ෂ, appear mostly in words of Sanskrit and Pali origin such as ධර්මය (dharma) and භාෂාව (language); in everyday speech they are usually said like their plain partners, so spelling them right is a matter of learning each word. ණ and ළ also occur in native Sinhala words. The vocalic ඍ and its sign ෘ appear in learned words like කෘෂිකර්මය (agriculture), while ඎ ඏ ඐ and their signs ෲ ෟ ෳ are almost never seen outside the full alphabet.

Sinhala conjuncts and the zero width joiner: how to type ශ්‍රී

When a consonant has no vowel and the next one follows straight on, Sinhala often joins them. The two most common joins are the yansaya, a ya written as a hook after the consonant (වාක්‍යය, sentence; මංගල්‍යය, celebration), and the rakaransaya, an r written as a stroke under it (ප්‍රශ්නය, question; ශ්‍රී, Sri). In Unicode both are typed as consonant + al-lakuna ් + the invisible zero width joiner (U+200D) + ය or ර. So ශ්‍රී is five characters: ශ, ්, the joiner, ර and ී.

Leave out the joiner and you get ශ්රී, with a visible al-lakuna, which is a common error in copied Sinhala. Phonetic keyboards insert the joiner for you; on a plain layout it has its own key combination, and in HTML it is ‍. The safest way to get a word like ශ්‍රී ලංකාව (Sri Lanka) right is to copy it whole from the greetings below.

On this page each letter and sign is a separate character to copy. A vowel sign or the al-lakuna on its own shows a dotted circle: pasted after a consonant, it attaches to it.

How to type Sinhala on a laptop, in Word and on a phone

Windows 10 and 11 include Sinhala: Settings → Time & language → Language & region → Add a language → Sinhala, then switch keyboards with Windows + Space. There are two layouts, Sinhala and Sinhala - Wij 9, based on the Wijesekara typewriter layout that Sri Lankan typists learn; text typed with them is Unicode and works in MS Word, browsers and email, displayed by Windows' Iskoola Pota font. macOS has Sinhala layouts too, under Keyboard → Input Sources.

Many people would rather type Sinhala phonetically, in what Sri Lankans call Singlish: you type ayubowan in Latin letters and get ආයුබෝවන්. On phones this is what the Helakuru app and the Sinhala keyboard of Gboard do, and after that WhatsApp, Facebook and SMS take Sinhala directly.

Older documents were often typed in non-Unicode fonts such as FM Abhaya or DL-Manel, which put Sinhala shapes on the keys of English letters. Copied out of such a file, the text turns into Latin gibberish and needs a converter or retyping before it can be pasted anywhere else. Everything on this page is Unicode: paste it, then pick any Sinhala font your app offers, such as Noto Sans Sinhala or Abhaya Libre, for a different style.

Sinhala numbers, punctuation and the rupee

Everyday Sinhala writes numbers with the international digits 0–9, and says them එක, දෙක, තුන, හතර, පහ, හය, හත, අට, නවය, දහය (one to ten). Sinhala also has digits of its own, the Lith digits ෦ ෧ ෨ ෩ ෪ ෫ ෬ ෭ ෮ ෯, known today mainly from old horoscopes and astrological almanacs; Unicode added them in 2014. An older set of Sinhala numerals, with separate signs for tens, a hundred and a thousand (𑇡 𑇢 … 𑇪 𑇳 𑇴), has a Unicode block of its own.

Modern Sinhala uses the same full stop, comma, question and exclamation marks as English, and the quotation marks “ ” and ‘ ’. The old full stop of palm-leaf manuscripts, the kunddaliya ෴, survives mainly as a decorative mark.

Sri Lanka's currency is the Sri Lankan rupee (රුපියල, code LKR), written රු. in Sinhala and Rs. in English, as in රු. 1,500. It has no sign of its own; the generic rupee sign ₨ is the Unicode character for it, while ₹ belongs to India.

Where Sinhala is spoken

Sinhala is the mother tongue of the Sinhalese, about three in four people in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰, and an official language of the country alongside Tamil. The CLDR estimate counts about 15 million speakers, and Sri Lankan communities abroad keep it alive from the Middle East to Italy, Britain and Australia. The name is traditionally linked to Sanskrit siṃha, lion, the animal that holds a sword on the flag.

Sinhala is an Indo-Aryan language, related to Hindi and Bangla, but it has been separated from them by the sea for more than two thousand years and its closest relative is Divehi, the language of the Maldives, which is written in a different script. Centuries next to Tamil have left many Tamil words in Sinhala. Divehi, Tamil and Sri Lanka each have their own collection on this site.