Singlish to Sinhala Converter — Type Sinhala in English

This converter is a deterministic transliteration engine, not a font-encoding swap and not a language model. It reads your Singlish text left to right and, at each position, matches the longest key in a fixed mapping table before falling back to shorter keys. That ordering is what lets th resolve to ත (dental) rather than ට, and aa resolve to the long vowel ආ rather than two short අ. Every target glyph comes from the Unicode Sinhala block (U+0D80–U+0DFF).

Sinhala consonants carry an inherent short a, so the engine tracks one piece of state: whether the last thing it emitted was a bare consonant waiting for a vowel decision. Three outcomes follow. A vowel right after a consonant attaches as a dependent sign — a pili — so ge becomes ගෙ and vaa becomes වා; a short a needs no sign at all. A consonant with another consonant or a word boundary after it has no vowel, so the engine appends the hal kirima (virama, U+0DCA) to silence the inherent vowel — that is why k at the end of a word becomes ක්. A vowel at the start of a word or after another vowel emits the independent letter instead, so a leading a becomes අ.

Two Sri Lankan sounds that English spells the same are separated by case and an h: the retroflex t→ට and d→ඩ versus the dental th→ත and dh→ද, with capitals for the retroflex N→ණ, L→ළ and the aspirates (K→ඛ, G→ඝ). A nasal n or m standing before a stop consonant becomes the anusvara ං, so lankaa renders ලංකා. When a consonant is followed by r, the engine joins them into a touching conjunct using the hal kirima and a zero-width joiner (U+200D), which is how shrii becomes ශ්‍රී. Digits, punctuation, symbols, and emoji match no key and pass through untouched, so mixed Sinhala-and-English text stays intact. The output is plain NFC Sinhala Unicode that renders on any modern device without a font install.

• The Unicode Standard — Sinhala block (U+0D80–U+0DFF)
• SLS 1134 — Sri Lanka Standard Sinhala Character Code (SLSI)
• UCSC Language Technology Research Laboratory — Sinhala romanization

Every Sinhala glyph in the mapping table was reconciled against the Unicode Sinhala code chart, and the three worked examples above reproduce exactly. Last cross-checked on 2026-06-09. Found a word that transliterates wrong? Email me with the input and the expected Sinhala.