This week’s trivia question was where is Sinhala
spoken? Sinhala is spoken in Sri
Lanka. It has approximately 12,000,000
speakers. It is one of the Indo-Aryan
languages and is separated from its linguistic relatives by hundreds of miles
(the languages immediately neighboring Sri Lanka are Dravidian). History (mythology) suggests that the
language came to Sri Lanka with settlers in 504 BC. Which linguists have concluded is probably close to the truth.
The question and answer are found on p. 558 of the book
Dictionary of Languages by Andrew
Dalby. The book was published by
Bloomsbury in 1998.
