- ISO 639
si- Its own name
- සිංහල
- Script
- Other-Brahmic
- Direction
- Left to right
Sinhala
Sinhala (සිංහල) is spoken by 14.9M people across 1 territory in CLDR, and is official nationally in 1 of them. Sri Lanka holds 100% of its speakers. One translation covers all of it, which is why localization is planned by language and launched by market.
At a glance
What one translation into Sinhala buys, before anyone argues about which market to enter first.
Speakers
14.9M
Sri Lanka 100%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 1 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory, largest first.
Online speakers
8.2M
0%100%
55% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
100%
0%100%
100% of speakers live in Sri Lanka. Treat this as one market with a diaspora, and take the tone and conventions from there.
Territories
1
1 where it is official nationally, 1 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$287B
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears at all. An upper bound on the market, not a revenue forecast: it counts the whole economy, not the speakers' share of it.
Translation rate
1.00×
1.0×1.6×+
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate used across this site's estimators.
Where Sinhala is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column does not add up to anything.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sri LankaLK | 68% | 14.9M | 8.2M | official |
The long tail matters. CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own. They are why a language's total reach is larger than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means the territory has no World Bank internet figure, and it does not mean zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation: the writing system, the grammar your message format has to survive, and what the words cost.
Writing system
Other-Brahmic
Lays out left to right, the same as the source. Bundle a webfont: platform defaults do not reliably cover this script.
Plural categories
2
Every counted message needs up to 2 arms, and the translator has to be given all of them.
Rate index
1.00×
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate.