Vedda (Veddah: [ʋæd̪ːə]) is an endangered language that is used by the indigenous Vedda people of Sri Lanka. Additionally, communities such as Coast Veddas and Anuradhapura Veddas who do not strictly identify as Veddas also use words from the Vedda language in part for communication during hunting and/or for religious chants, throughout the island. According to Ethnologue, Vedda is an Indo-European language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch, but some linguists consider it a language isolate that is not related to either Dravidian or Indo-European. When a systematic field study was conducted in 1959, the language was confined to the older generation of Veddas from Dambana. In the 1990s, self-identifying Veddas knew few words and phrases in Vedda, but there were individuals who knew the language comprehensively. Initially there was considerable debate amongst linguists as to whether Vedda is a dialect of Sinhala or an independent language. Later studies indicate that the language spoken by today's Veddas is a creole which evolved from ancient times, when the Veddas came into contact with the early Tamil and Sinhala, from whom they increasingly borrowed words and synthetic features, yielding the cumulative effect that Vedda resembles Tamil and Sinhala in many particulars, but its grammatical core remains intact. The parent Vedda language(s) is of unknown linguistic origins, while Sinhala is part of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Phonologically, Vedda is distinguished from Sinhala by the higher frequency of palatal sounds [c] and [ɟ]. The effect is also heightened by the addition of inanimate suffixes. Morphologically, the Vedda word classes are nouns, verbs and invariables, with unique gender distinctions in animate nouns. It has reduced and simplified many forms of Sinhala such as second person pronouns and denotations of negative meanings. Instead of borrowing new words from Sinhala or other languages, Vedda creates combinations of words from a limited lexical stock. Vedda maintains many archaic Sinhala terms from the 10th to 12th centuries, as a relict of its close contact with Sinhala, while retaining a number of unique words that cannot be derived from Sinhala. Vedda has exerted a substratum influence in the formation of Sinhala. This is evident by the presence of both lexical and structural elements in Sinhala which cannot be traced to either Indo-Aryan or neighboring Dravidian languages.
History
It is unknown which languages were spoken in Sri Lanka before it was settled by Prakrit-speaking immigrants in the 5th century BCE. The term Vedda is a Dravidian word and stems from the Tamil word vēṭu meaning 'hunting', vēṭaṉ 'hunter'. Cognate terms (such as bēḍar, bēḍa "hunter" in Kannada, vyadh (व्यध्) in Sanskrit language) are used throughout South India to describe hunter-gatherers. Sri Lanka has had other hunter-gathering peoples such as the Rodiya and Kinnaraya. The earliest account of Vedda was written by Ryklof Van Goens (1663–1675), who served as a Director General of the Dutch East India Company in Sri Lanka. He wrote that the Veddas' language was much closer to Sinhala than to Tamil. Robert Knox, an Englishman held captive by a Kandyan king, wrote in 1681 that the wild and settled Veddas spoke the language of the Sinhala people. The Portuguese friar Fernão de Queiroz, who wrote a nuanced description of Vedda in 1686, reported that the language was not mutually intelligible with other native languages. Robert Percival wrote in 1803 that the Veddas, although seemingly speaking a broken dialect of Sinhala, amongst themselves spoke a language that was known only to them. But John Davies in 1831 wrote that the Veddas spoke a language that was understood by the Sinhala except for a few words. These discrepancies in observations were clarified by Charles Pridham, who wrote in 1848 that the Veddas knew a form of Sinhala that they were able to use in talking to outsiders, but to themselves they spoke in a language that, although influenced by Sinhala and Tamil, was understood only by them. The first systematic attempt at studying the Vedda language was undertaken by Hugh Neville, an English civil servant in British Ceylon. He founded The Taprobanian, a quarterly journal devoted to the study of everything Ceylonese. He speculated, based on etymological studies, that Vedda is based on an Old Sinhala form called Hela. His views were followed by Henry Parker, another English civil servant and the author of Ancient Ceylon (1909), who wrote that most Vedda words were borrowed from Sinhala, but he also noted words of unique origin, which he assigned to the original language of the Veddas. The second most important study was made in 1935 by Wilhem Geiger, who also sounded the alarm that Vedda would be soon extinct and needed to be studied in detail. One of the linguists to heed that call was Manniku W. Sugathapala De Silva who did a comprehensive study of the language in 1959 as a PhD thesis, which he published as a book: according to him, the language was restricted to the older generation of people from the Dambana region, with the younger generation shifting to Sinhala, whereas Coast Veddas were speaking a dialect of Sri Lankan Tamil that is used in the region. During religious festivals, people who enter a trance or spirit possession sometimes use a mixed language that contains words from Vedda. Veddas of the Anuradhapura region speak in Sinhala, but use Vedda words to denote animals during hunting trips.
Classification
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