WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Sinhala
Sinhala gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, where the character count is not the key count: 29 distinct characters appear across 22 practice words. Sinhala is typed on the Sinhala Wijesekara layout.
Written in rounded letterforms with almost no straight lines at all — the usual explanation being palm-leaf manuscripts, whose grain a straight stroke could split. The alphabet is conventionally split into a core set used for native Sinhala and an extended set used for Sanskrit and Pali loanwords, which is why some letters appear constantly and others almost never. The Wijesekara layout, designed for Sinhala typewriters in the 1950s, is still the standard.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 29 distinct characters across 22 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Sinhala keyboard layout
- Sinhala Wijesekara
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 21 of the 29 characters its practice words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ා8
- ත7
- ය7
- ව7
- ම5
- ර5
- ක4
- ු4
- ්4
- ද3
The longest practice word in this script is වර්ෂය in Sinhala.
The one language written in Sinhala
Other writing systems
- Tamil Among the oldest continuously written languages in the world, with inscriptions going back more than two thousand years.
- Telugu A rounded script closely related to Kannada; the two were a single script until roughly the fifteenth century and remain similar enough that readers of one can often puzzle out the other.
- Thai Forty-four consonants, around 28 vowel forms and four tone marks, written without spaces between words — spaces mark the ends of clauses instead, which makes working out where one word ends a job for the reader and a well-known hard problem for software.
There is a written guide for this script: Typing Sinhala: Wijesekara, and an alphabet in two halves. A typewriter layout from the 1950s, a script with no straight lines, and an alphabet where half the letters are for words borrowed from elsewhere.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.