World Language Map

Where is Sinhala spoken?

Sinhala (සිංහල භාෂාව) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Sri Lanka. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Sinhala is spoken

Sinhala is spoken in one country: Sri Lanka. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Sri Lanka68%14,948,168

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Sinhala is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Sinhala.

How many people speak Sinhala?

Wikidata gives about 15.3 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Sinhala sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Sinhala as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Indo-Iranian
  4. Indo-Aryan
  5. Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan
  6. Dhivehi-Sinhala
  7. Sinhalaic
  8. Sinhala

More about Sinhala

Codes: ISO 639-3 sin, Glottolog sinh1246. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Sinhala

Where is Sinhala spoken?

Sinhala is spoken in Sri Lanka. Unicode CLDR puts it at 68% of the population of Sri Lanka, which is about 14,948,168 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Sinhala?

Wikidata gives about 15.3 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Sinhala in?

Glottolog places Sinhala in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan, Dhivehi-Sinhala and Sinhalaic.

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