ABSTRACT
Sinhalese (Sinhala) is a New Indo-Aryan language, and it is natural that the oldest Sinhalese inscriptions (dating from the third century BC) should be written in a script which is close to the Asokan Edict script of northern India. In the tenth/eleventh century AD, however, Tamil incursion into Ceylon brought with it a south Indian Grantha-based script (see Tamil), and it is this script which has been ever since, and still is, used for Sinhalese.
