List of Sinhala words of Tamil origin

Borrowings

The words pertaining to the fields of commerce, administration, botany, food and military 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 of South Asia and
• Tamil speaking traders conducted most of the island's foreign trade since the 10th century AD. This is attested by multiple Tamil 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 Sinhala phonological (e.g. paḻi becomes paḷi(ya) because the sound of /ḻ/, [ɻ], does not exist in the Sinhala phoneme inventory) or morphological system (e.g. ilakkam becomes ilakkama because Sinhala inanimate nouns (see grammatical gender) need to end with /a/, [ə], in order to be declineable).

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 other consonants (e.g. pālam > pālama).
• With a /ya/ or /va/ added to words ending in vowels (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 Sinhala pronunciation there is no distinction between /ḷ/ and /l/; the letter /ḷ/ is merely maintained as an etymological spelling.

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 word täpäl (Tamil tapāl) gives away its old age because the respective umlaut processes took place before the 8th century; iḍama (Tamil iṭam) 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.

In the following list, Tamil words are romanized in accordance with Tamil spelling. This results in seeming discrepancies in voicing 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 word ampalam, [ambalam], logically results in the Sinhala spelling ambalama, 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, see National Library at Calcutta romanization and Tamil script. Exceptions from the standard are the romanization of Sinhala long "ä" ([æː]) as "ää", and the non-marking of prenasalized stops.

Several verbs have been adopted into Sinhala from the Tamil language. The vast majority of these are compound 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 Devi Sinhala 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)