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Sri Lanka, [a] historically known as Ceylon, [b] and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an island country in South Asia. It lies in the Indian Ocean , southwest of the Bay of Bengal , separated from the Indian peninsula by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait .
The Indian census takes the widest possible definition of "Hindi" as the broad variety of the Hindi languages. The native speakers of Hindi so defined account for 39% of Indians. Bengali is the second most spoken language of South Asia, found in both Bangladesh and Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam.
The Tamil language is spoken by native Sri Lankan Tamils and is also spoken by Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka and by most Sri Lankan Moors. Tamil speakers number around 4.8 million (29% of the population), making it the second largest language in Sri Lanka. There are more than 40,000 speakers of the Sri Lankan Malay language.
Sinhala (/ ˈ s ɪ n h ə l ə, ˈ s ɪ ŋ ə l ə / SIN-hə-lə, SING-ə-lə; [2] Sinhala: සිංහල, siṁhala, [ˈsiŋɦələ]), [3] sometimes called Sinhalese (/ ˌ s ɪ n (h) ə ˈ l iː z, ˌ s ɪ ŋ (ɡ) ə ˈ l iː z / SIN-(h)ə-LEEZ, SING-(g)ə-LEEZ), is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka, who make up the largest ethnic group on the ...
For instance, the Buddhist literature of the Theravada-Buddhists of Sri Lanka, written in Pali, used Sinhala script. Modern Sinhalese emerged in the 13th century and is marked by the composition of the grammar book Sidat Sangara. [1] In 1736, the Dutch were the first to print with Sinhala type on the island. The resulting type followed the ...
During the British colonial era, English was the official language in Ceylon (known as Sri Lanka since 1972). Until the passage of the Free Education Bill in 1944, education in the English language was the preserve of the Sri Lankan elite and the ordinary people had little knowledge of it.
Having taken root in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1796, Sri Lankan English has gone through over two centuries of development.In terms of its socio-cultural setting, Sri Lankan English can be explored largely in terms of different stages of the country's class and racial tension, economy, social disparity, and postwar rehabilitation and reconciliation. [10]
The defenses of Sri Lanka were beefed up to three British army divisions because the island was strategically important, holding almost all the British Empire's resources of rubber. Rationing was instituted so that Sri Lankans were comparatively better fed than their Indian neighbours, in order to prevent disaffection among the natives.