Sinhalese is spoken on the island of Sri Lanka by about 15 million people.
Sinhalese is written with the Sinhala writing system. It is based on an abugida, meaning each character contains a consonant plus a vowel as a diacritic. There are 56 syllabi – twice as many as in English.
Interestingly, whilst Sinhala has its fair share of slang and swear words in the spoken form, it is almost impossible to find these in any form of written text.