Last updated: 2019-10-08
Background
Language Family: Indo-European / Indo-Iranian / Indo-Aryan / Sinhalese-Maldivian
- Sinhala exhibits diglossia, where the written form contrasts greatly with the spoken form of Sinhala. Written Sinhala is reserved for formal communication, and does not use Sinhala slang or taboo terms. Although spoken Sinhala has various dialects, I’ve chosen to base my phonology off of formal speech.
- Sinhala is predomiantly spoken in Sri Lanka.
Phonology
Consonants
- Consonant letters have an inherent /a/ following it. For example, the letter representing /k/ would actually reflect /ka/ (Chandralal 2010, 22).
- Consonant length is contrastive, and long consonants are generally represented in the orthography as duplicate graphemes (Chandralal 2010, 32).
- There are also special “clusters,” which are the four prenasalized consonants. The first consonant (a nasal) is very short, and the second consonant is a stop. These “clusters” are thought of as single phonemes and are represented orthographically (Chandralal 2010, 33–34).
- /f/ exclusively appears in borrowed words from English (Chandralal 2010, 22). Because it appears frequently in the Crúbadán corpus and is “gaining ground” in terms of English’s influence, I have decided to include it below. However, it is often substituted with [p] (Herat 2017, 13).
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Place of Articulation
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Manner of Articulation
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Labial
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Dental
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Alveolar
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Postalveolar
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Retroflex
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Palatal
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Velar
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Glottal
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Stops
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p b ᵐb
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t̪ d̪ ⁿd̪
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ʈ ɖ ⁿɖ
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k ɡ ᵑɡ
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Affricates
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tʃ dʒ
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Fricatives
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f
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s
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ʃ
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h
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Nasals
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m
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n
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ŋ
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Trills
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r
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Approximants
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ʋ
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l
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j
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Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless, whereas those on the right are voiced. Where three phonemes share a cell, they are ordered voiceless, voiced, and prenasalized.
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Vowels
- Vowel length is contrastive (Chandralal 2010, 29). Long vowels are indicated by duplicate graphemes.
- Chandralal (2010) includes /ə/ in the vowel inventory; however, he states that it occurs in complementary distribution with /a/ (p. 29). In spoken Sinhala, word-final positions pose problems between such vowels and /aː/ or any short and long vowel because vowels tend to be shortened word-finally. Given that we are transcribing written words, I have decided to move forward with the language.
- Disanayaka (1991) suggests that vowel clusters may occur in Sinhala (later references don’t always agree with this).
- I interviewed a consultant (born and raised in Colombo, Sinhala) who speaks and reads Standard Sinhala, and the only vowel clusters she spoke were [ai] and [au] (which is consistent with the orthography).
- The other vowel clusters suggested by Disanayaka usually have a [j] or labiodental approximant in between them, pronounced quickly in speech.
- I have chosen to include /ai/ and /au/ below, as they are represented in the orthography (Congress 2011). Unlike the other vowels, these diphthongs do not have contrastive long variants.
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Front
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Central
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Back
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High
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i
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u
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Mid
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e
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o
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Low
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æ
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a
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Alphabet
- Notice that some consonants below are represented by two separate graphemes. Those on the right of the first column are the aspirated variants. Because aspiration is not phonemic, at least in the formal written variety of the language, such contrast will be neutralized in the transcription rules (Widyalankara 2015, 3).
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Consonant Grapheme
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Phoneme
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Comment
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ක; ඛ
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/ka/
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ග; ඝ
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/ɡa/
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ඞ
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/ŋa/
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ඟ
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/ᵑɡa/
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ච; ඡ
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/tʃa/
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ජ; ඣ
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/dʒa/
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ට; ඨ
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/ʈa/
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ඩ; ඪ
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/ɖa/
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ණ; න
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/na/
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ඬ
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/ⁿɖa/
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ත; ථ
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/t̪a/
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ද; ධ
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/d̪a/
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ඳ
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/ⁿd̪a/
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ප; ඵ
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/pa/
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බ; භ
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/ba/
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ම
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/ma/
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ඹ
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/ᵐba/
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ය
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/ja/
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ර
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/ra/
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ල; ළ
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/la/
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ව
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/ʋa/
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ශ; ෂ
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/ʃa/
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ස
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/sa/
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හ
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/ha/
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ෆ
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/fa/
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(Word-Initial) Grapheme
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අ
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/a/
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ආ
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/aː/
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ඇ
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/æ/
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ඈ
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/æː/
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ඉ
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/i/
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ඊ
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/iː/
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උ
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/u/
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ඌ
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/uː/
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ඍ
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/ri/
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ඎ
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/riː/
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එ
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/e/
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ඒ
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/eː/
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ඓ
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/ai/
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ඔ
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/o/
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ඕ
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/oː/
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ඖ
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/au/
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Diacritic
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ා
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/aː/
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ැ
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/æ/
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ෑ
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/æː/
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ි
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/i/
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ී
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/iː/
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ු
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/u/
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ූ
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/uː/
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ෘ
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/ri/
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ෲ
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/riː/
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ෙ
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/e/
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ේ
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/eː/
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ෛ
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/ai/
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ො
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/o/
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ෝ
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/oː/
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ෞ
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/au/
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ං
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/ŋ/
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this letter is called an anusvara and acts as an assimilating (by place) nasal to the following consonant, however, /ŋ/ is said to be the underlying form (Nadungodage et al. 2018, 113)
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ඃ
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/h/
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this diacritic is called a visarga (ibid.)
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්
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ø
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this diacritic is called a virama and deletes the inherent /a/ following a consonant
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Lenition Rules
- Stops (excluding retroflex), nasals, and /w/ are pronounced lenis intervocalically (Chandralal 2010, 32).
References
Chandralal, Dileep. 2010. Sinhala. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Congress, Library of. 2011. “Sinhalese Romanization Table.”
Disanayaka, J. B. 1991. The Structure of Spoken Sinhala, Volume One: Sounds and Their Patterns. National Institute of Education, Maharagama, Sri Lanka.
Nadungodage, Thilini, Chamila Liyanage, Amathri Hansinie Perera, Randil Pushpananda, and Ruvan Weerasinghe. 2018. “Sinhala G2p Conversion for Speech Processing.” In The 6th Intl. Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages. doi:10.21437/sltu.2018.
Widyalankara, Rohini Chandrica. 2015. “Interlingual Texting: Texting in Sinhala Using English Fonts.” International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications 5 (8).