Sinhala

Sinhala is a Unicode block containing characters for the Sinhala and Pali languages of Sri Lanka, and is also used for writing Sanskrit in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala allocation is loosely based on the ISCII standard, except that Sinhala contains extra prenasalized consonant letters, leading to inconsistencies with other ISCII-Unicode script allocations.

The Sinhalese alphabet is an abugida used by the Sinhala people in Sri Lanka and elsewhere to write the Sinhala language and also the liturgical languages Pali and Sanskrit. Being a member of the Brahmic family of scripts, the Sinhalese script can trace its ancestry back more than 2,000 years. Sinhalese is often considered two alphabets, or an alphabet within an alphabet, due to the presence of two sets of letters. The core set, known as the śuddha siṃhala or eḷu hōḍiya, can represent all native phonemes. In order to render Sanskrit and Pali words, an extended set, the miśra siṃhala, is available.