ASIAN LANGUAGES

Wikipedia provides a wonderful means of investigating the common links between South and South-East Asian languages and scripts. This little collection of links to Wikipedia pages shows how closely connected the Sinhalese (Singhalese) and Tamil languages really are. The British, who declared that the colonized population of Ceylon, which they had obtained in a treaty from the Dutch in 1810 declared, in line with German and French experts, that the "Tamil Race" was "Dravidian", originating from the South of India, while the "Singhalese Race" were of "Aryan Stock" and came from North India. The races, languages and cultures of the island were declared by the white experts and their brown and white students after them, to be two separate "ethnic groups". Modern DNA testing has shown the fallacy of these old anthropological theories, though they are still repeated often enough. In fact, the Singhalese and Tamil speaking people in Sri Lanka are closely related, genetically and linguistically, And both groups owe significant parts of their genetics and culture to the indigenous people of Sri Lanka - the Veddah, Naga and Yaksha people.