The AISLS Colombo center library has an excellent collection of textbooks, dictionaries and reference books useful for studying Tamil and Sinhala. Some textbooks include audio or audio-visual components. The following resources are also useful.
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This Tamil language curriculum, originally created in the 1960s by E. Annamalai and James Lindholm, has now been updated and digitized by the University of Chicago. The site contains units on the alphabet, basic texts for reading practice, and sample conversations of colloquial spoken Tamil. Each unit contains audio recordings so students can hear correct pronunciations. The site also includes guides for grammar and vocabulary.
- A Colloquial Sinhalese Reader
Published by the late M.W. Sugathapala de Silva in 1971, and reproduced here with the permission of his heirs. It may be downloaded for personal use only. A few hard copies are available from Dr. de Silva’s heirs through amazon.co.uk
- Cornell University Language Resource Center
Offers for sale a range of instructional materials for Sinhala published by the Cornell University South Asia Program. The sales list includes a course package (textbook & digital download) for colloquial Sinhala, an Intermediate Sinhala Reader, a handbook for Spoken Sinhala Grammar, the only available textbook for literary Sinhala, and more.
- English Translations of the Reading Passages in James W. Gair & W.S. Karunatilaka, Literary Sinhala (Ithaca: Cornell University South Asia Program and Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, 1974)
In 2014, AISLS commissioned these translations by Theresa McGarry and Liyanage Amarakeerthi in order to make the Literary Sinhala textbook more useful, particularly for those using it without an instructor. It is available here as a pdf file at no cost for personal use. The original print textbook remains available for purchase from Cornell University.
- Foreign Service Institute, Basic Sinhala Course
This course includes three volumes of eBook textbooks, covering the Sinhala script, general conversations, and grammatical forms, respectively. The site also contains the large “Sinhala Language Trainer’s Manual” used by the Peace Corps.
- South Asia Summer Language Institute, Madison, WI
Offers intensive summer instruction in Sinhala, Tamil and other South Asian languages. Both introductory and intermediate courses are offered, but they are dependent on gaining sufficient enrollment.
- Tamil Language in Context, University of Pennsylvania
This site offers textual, audio, video and interactive exercise materials for beginning learners of Tamil
Online Dictionaries
To make full use of the dictionaries listed here, the ability to type Sinhala and Tamil characters in Unicode font is key. The kaputa.com website is a simple way to type with Sinhala or Tamil Unicode keyboards without requiring any downloads. Likewise, Google Input Tools offers its own Unicode typing interface for Sinhala, Tamil, and many other languages.
- Digital Dictionaries of South Asia
Part of the University of Chicago’s Digital South Asia Library, this page provides a fully searchable interface for many important dictionaries relevant to Sri Lankan studies. These include the dictionary of the Pali Text Society, Charles Carter’s Sinhala-English dictionary, as well as seven different Tamil dictionaries that can be searched individually or through a single portal to search them all.
- Internet Archive Dictionaries
Various dictionaries in PDF format can be found on the Internet Archive site. There are several Sinhala dictionaries as well as a large number of Tamil dictionaries, which include some on specialty topics, as well as dictionaries between Tamil and languages other than English.
- Madura Online
This dictionary is useable as English-Sinhala or Sinhala-English. It is the most comprehensive online lexicon for modern Sinhala, being especially useful for contemporary technical terms and idioms.
- Sri Sumangala Sinhala-Sinhala Dictionary
Väliviṭiye Sorata’s Śrī Sumaṅgala Śabdakoṣaya is the most comprehensive dictionary compiled for literary Sinhala, with many entries citing a sample Sinhala work where the word appears. This dictionary is especially useful for defining rare terms that appear in older Sinhala manuscripts. The full text, consisting of Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, is available in PDF format from tipitika.lk. The second volume includes an English essay on the evolution of the Sinhala language.
