Sinhalese IDN Domains

Sinhalese, also known as Sinhala is the native language of the approximately 16 million Sinhalese people in Sri Lanka. It is also used by approximately 3 million people as a secondary language in other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka as well. It is considered to be one of the official national languages in Sri Lanka as well as Pali.

Sinhalese is in the top 5 beautiful alphabets in the world, but it actually has 2 alphabets. Many consider it to have an alphabet inside of an alphabet because there is a presence of 2 different sets of letters. The "Pure Sinhalese" alphabet is known as suddha simhala, while the extended "mixed Sinhalese" set is called misra siafhala. Most of the letters have curlicues because it was originally written on leaves, and straight lines were considered undesirable at the time.

It is in the family of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages, however it has many things that differentiate it from the others in the Indo-Aryan family. It was highly used in the development of the Theravada Buddhist literature.