Linguistic situation in Sri Lanka

Understanding the linguistic situation in every country and society helps to obtain a clear idea of every culture and society. This article mainly focuses on understanding the linguistic situation in Sri Lanka, based on considering the history of its languages, their evolution, use of new languages and their varieties, and on viewing how migration languages influence the languages originally spoken in the country. This article mainly uses descriptive method to analyze the linguistic situation. Sri Lanka is the only country where the Sinhala Language is an official language spoken by the majority of the country population. The Sinhala language originated in Sri Lanka and the span of its recorded history is about 2600 years. Besides Sinhala, the Tamil language is used as a mother tongue in Sri Lanka. After nearly 500 years of the European colonial period, the English language started to be widely used in Sri Lanka as well. English was used as the only official language in Sri Lanka for about 150 years; but nowadays Sinhala and Tamil are official languages, while English is used as a link language. 31 per cent of the country population speak English but only around 1 per cent of citizens use English as a native language. There is also an opportunity to study classical and modern European languages in the country. In Sri Lanka, as a multinational country, they use two official languages and one link language. More than 50 per cent of the population in Sri Lanka are bi- or trilingual.