Sinhala

Sinhalese tradition and historical evidence point to migration from northern India around the 5th or 6th century BCE, with successive waves of settlers establishing Sinhalese kingdoms across the island. The language evolved separately from northern Indo-Aryan branches for over two thousand years, picking up substantial Tamil influence (long contact with Tamil neighbours within Sri Lanka), Pali (the language of Theravada Buddhism), and later Portuguese, Dutch, and English.

No — Sinhala is Indo-Aryan (Indo-European), Tamil is Dravidian. They've shared the island of Sri Lanka for over two thousand years and contact has produced extensive bilingualism, loanword exchange, and some grammatical convergence, but the language families are unrelated. Sri Lanka recognizes both Sinhala and Tamil as official national languages.

An abugida descended from Brahmi, with rounded letterforms reminiscent of South Indian scripts (and like them, originating from palm-leaf writing where curves prevented tearing the leaf). Sinhala script has a 'pure' set of letters used for native and Pali words and an extended set for Sanskrit borrowings, distinguishing aspirated and unaspirated consonants that aren't otherwise contrastive in spoken Sinhala.

There's a notable diglossic split between Literary Sinhala and Spoken Sinhala — even more pronounced than in Tamil. Literary Sinhala uses different verb endings, vocabulary, and even some pronouns from spoken Sinhala. Books and formal writing default to literary register; conversation and informal writing use spoken Sinhala. Learners often hit the diglossic wall when course material in one register doesn't transfer to real conversation in the other.

Among harder Indo-Aryan languages. The script takes a couple of weeks. The diglossic split is genuinely difficult — learning literary Sinhala doesn't fully equip you for spoken Sinhala. The phonology has retroflex distinctions and aspirated/unaspirated contrasts (in literary register) that English doesn't have. Vocabulary has limited overlap with English, and substantial Tamil and Pali loanwords.