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Sinhala words ofTamil origin came about as part of the more than 2000 years of language interactions betweenSinhala andTamil in the island ofSri Lanka, as well as through Dravidian substratum effect on the Sinhala language. According to linguists, there are about 900 Tamil words in Sinhala usage.^[1]

Sinhala is classified as anIndo-Aryan language and Tamil is classified as aDravidian language. Separated from its sister Indo-Aryan languages such asHindi andBengali by a large belt of Dravidian languages, Sinhala along withDhivehi of the Maldives evolved somewhat separately.

Close interaction with the Tamil language and the assimilation of Tamils into Sinhalese society contributed to the adoption of several Tamil origin words into the Sinhalese language. The range of borrowings goes beyond the scope to be expected for a situation where two neighbouring peoples exchange material goods: Firstly, there are many Tamil loanwords pertaining to everyday and social life (kinship terms, body parts, ordinary activities). Secondly, several lexical words (nouns,adjectives andverbs) along with interjections (ayiyō), (aḍō) have also been borrowed. This - along with the impact Tamil has had on Sinhalasyntax (e.g. the use of averbal adjective of "to say" as asubordinating conjunction meaning "whether" and "that") - is suggestive of not only close coexistence but the existence of large numbers ofbilinguals and a high degree of mixing andintermarriage.^[2][3]

Borrowings

The words pertaining to the fields ofcommerce,administration,botany,food andmilitary are the most numerous; this is to be expected because

• new innovations and goods usually reached the Sinhalese via the Tamils whose area of settlement separates them from the rest ofSouth Asia and
• Tamil speaking traders conducted most of the island'sforeign trade since the 10th century AD. This is attested by multipleTamil inscriptions in Sri Lanka left by medieval trade guilds.

Tamil loanwords in Sinhala can appear in the same form as the original word (e.g.akkā), but this is quite rare. Usually, a word has undergone some kind of modification to fit into the Sinhalaphonological (e.g.paḻi becomespaḷi(ya) because the sound of /ḻ/,[ɻ], does not exist in the Sinhalaphoneme inventory) ormorphological system (e.g.ilakkam becomesilakkama because Sinhala inanimate nouns (seegrammatical gender) need to end with /a/,[ə], in order to bedeclineable).

These are the main ways Tamil words are incorporated into the Sinhala lexicon with different endings:

• With an /a/ added to Tamil words ending in /m/ and otherconsonants (e.g.pālam >pālama).
• With a /ya/ or /va/ added to words ending invowels (e.g.araḷi >araliya).
• With the Tamil ending /ai/ represented as /ē/, commonly spelt /aya/.
• With the animate ending /yā/ added to Tamil words signifying living beings or /yā/ replacing the Tamil endings /aṉ/, /ar/, etc. (e.g.caṇṭiyar >caṇḍiyā).

It can be observed that the Tamil phonemes /ḷ/ and /ḻ/ do not coherently appear as /ḷ/ in Sinhala but sometimes as /l/ as well. This is because in Sinhalapronunciation there is no distinction between /ḷ/ and /l/; the letter /ḷ/ is merely maintained as anetymologicalspelling.

In many cases, the appearance of a loanword in a language indicates whether the borrowing is old or more recent: The more a word deviates from the "original" one, the longer it must have been a part of the respective lexicon, because while being used, a word can undergo changes (sometimes regular sound changes along with the native words). The inversion of this argument is not possible since loanwords already matching the linguistic requirements of the target language may remain unchanged. Thus, the wordtäpäl (Tamiltapāl) gives away its old age because the respectiveumlaut processes took place before the 8th century;iḍama (Tamiliṭam) however needn't be a recent borrowing, because no sound changes that could have affected this word have taken place in Sinhala since at least the 13th century.

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In the following list, Tamil words are romanized in accordance with Tamil spelling. This results in seeming discrepancies invoicing between Sinhala words and their Tamil counterparts. Sinhala borrowing however has taken place on the basis of the sound of the Tamil words; thus, the wordampalam,[ambalam], logically results in the Sinhala spellingambalama, and so forth. However, the Tamil language used here for comparison is Tamil as spoken in Sri Lanka.

Note: For information on the transcription used, seeNational Library at Calcutta romanization andTamil script. Exceptions from the standard are theromanization of Sinhala long "ä" ([æː]) as "ää", and the non-marking ofprenasalized stops.

Several verbs have been adopted into Sinhala from the Tamil language. The vast majority of these arecompound verbs consisting of a Tamil origin primary verb and a Sinhala origin light verb.

• Dutch loanwords in Sinhala
• English loanwords in Sinhala
• Portuguese loanwords in Sinhala

• Coperahewa, Sandagomi and Arunachalam, Sarojini DeviSinhala Bhashave Demala Vacana Akaradiya[Dictionary of Tamil Words in Sinhala] (Colombo: S.Godage, 2002).
• Gair, James (1998).Studies in South Asian Linguistics.New York: Oxford University Press. p. 368.ISBN 0-19-509521-9.
• Geiger, Wilhelm: Linguistic Character of Sinhalese, in: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon), Vol. XXXIV
• Gunasekara, A.M.:A Comprehensive Grammar of the Sinhalese Language, Colombo 1891 (reprint New Delhi 1986),ISBN 81-206-0106-8 (§234: Naturalised and derived words from Tamil)

• Sinhala Tamil online dictionary
• Tamil Sinhala online dictionary
• Article on Sanskritisms in Sinhala (partly based on opinion)

• Tamil language-related lists
• Sri Lanka-related lists
• Lists of Sinhala words of foreign origin

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