Sri Lanka has two official languages: Sinhala and Tamil. Sinhala, spoken by the Sinhalese majority, is an Indo-Aryan language descended from ancient Sanskrit and Prakrit, brought to the island by settlers from northern India around 500 BCE. It is the only surviving member of its branch of Indo-Aryan, having evolved in geographic isolation on the island. The Sinhala script is derived from the ancient Brahmi script and is written from left to right. Tamil, spoken by Sri Lankan Tamils and Indian Tamils in the north and east, belongs to the Dravidian language family and is one of the world's longest-surviving classical languages with a literary tradition spanning over 2,000 years. British colonial rule (1815–1948) established English as the language of administration, and it remains a widely used link language in business and higher education. The classification of Sinhala as 'Dravidian' here reflects the broader linguistic classification context of the island, though Sinhala itself is Indo-Aryan — the dominant lens through which Sri Lanka is contextualised regionally given Tamil's Dravidian presence.
