Sinhala linguistic data

Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Sinhala's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.

Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.

Literary (or 'written') Sinhala has different verb conjugation, agreement marking, and a more conservative lexicon than colloquial spoken Sinhala. Books, news, sermons, and formal writing use literary Sinhala; everyday speech uses the colloquial. Both share the script. Native speakers manage the split largely through context, learning literary forms in school.

Sinhala collapsed the inherited Indo-Aryan masculine/feminine/neuter system into a two-way animate/inanimate split. The change has parallels in Dravidian gender systems (which use animacy in plural agreement), and likely reflects contact with Tamil and other Dravidian languages spoken nearby. Most Indo-Aryan languages keep masculine/feminine; Sinhala is unusual.

Sinhala is genetically Indo-Aryan, sharing core grammar (SOV, postpositions, agglutination) with Hindi and other Indo-Aryan relatives. But long contact with Tamil influenced the animacy-based gender system and some vocabulary. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.