Sri Lanka has three main ethnic groups.
The largest of the three groups are theSinhalese. Most of them areBuddhist. Their language isSinhala which is anIndo-Aryan language. They make up about 75% of the population.
The second largest group are theTamils who areDravidian. They are mostlyHindu and mostly live in the north. They speak theTamil language which is aDravidian language. There are about 2,271,000 Tamils in Sri Lanka.
The third largest group are the Sri Lankan Moors. They areMuslim. There are over 1.5 million people in this group. They are predominantlyTamil speakers.
Other than these three main groups, there are burghers (descendants of colonial ancestors), Malays and Chinese.
There is also a small indigenous population called 'veddas'.
The total population of the island is over 22 million people.
The island has a recorded history of over 2500 years. Buddhist missionaries were sent from India in 250 BC during the reign of EmperorAshoka of the Mauryan Empire. The kings of the island, and eventually most of the Sinhalese people, became Buddhists. Legend has it that Buddha visited the island three times.
There were many Sinhalese Kingdoms such as Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Dambadeniya, Kotte and Kandy. The Island also faced several invasions from India and one such invasion led to the establishment of the Jaffna Kingdom in the North.
The island was subject tocolonisation beginning with thePortuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries, theDutch in the 17th and 18th centuries, and lastly theBritish from 1796 to 1948. The British traded as the others had done, but also developedplantations ofcoffee andtea. Tea was planted after afungus destroyed the coffee plantations in 1869. The tea plantations were the basis of Sri Lankan prosperity for a hundred years. Lastly,rubber plantations were started in the early 20th century. In 1965, Ceylon became the world's leading exporter of tea, with 200,000 tonnes of tea being shipped internationally annually.[12]
Independence from Britain was gained in 1948, together withDominion status in the BritishCommonwealth of Nations. In 1972, Ceylon changed its name officially to the Republic of Sri Lanka, and is still a member of the Commonwealth.[13]
TheSri Lankan Civil War against Tamil separatists(LTTE) erupted in 1983 and only came to an end in 2009. In the 2010s,tourism rapidly grew as a source of foreigninvestment andcurrency. An economic crisis in the early 2020s led to civil unrest.
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