Report on Phonetics and Phonology of Sinhala

This report examines the major characteristics of Sinhala language related to Phonetics and Phonology. The main topics under study are Segmental and Supra-segmental sounds in Spoken Sinhala. The first part presents Sinhala Phonemic Inventory, which describes phonemes with their associated features and phonotactics of Sinhala. Supra-segmental features like Syllabification, Stress, Pitch and Intonation, followed by the procedure for letter to sound conversion are described in the latter part. The research on Syllabification leads to the identification of set of rules for syllabifying a given word. The syllabication algorithm achieved an accuracy of 99.95%. Due to the phonetic nature of the Sinhala alphabet, the letter-to-phoneme mapping was easily done, however to produce the correct phonetized version of a word, some modifications were needed to be done. The Letter-to-sound conversion algorithm written for this purpose yields an accuracy of 98.21%. The study carried out on stress assignment revealed that word level stress is fixed in the first syllable. Generally, the long vowels are also stressed.