[4] The Sinhala script is a Brahmi derivate and was thought to have been imported from Northern India around the 3rd century BCE.

[7] Medieval Sinhalese, which emerged around 750 AD, is marked by very strong influence from the Grantha script.

For instance, the Buddhist literature of the Theravada-Buddhists of Sri Lanka, written in Pali, used Sinhala script.

Modern Sinhalese emerged in the 13th century and is marked by the composition of the grammar book Sidat Sangara.

The resulting type followed the features of the native Sinhala script used on palm leaves.

The type created by the Dutch was monolinear and geometric in fashion, with no separation between words in early documents.

During the second half of the 19th century, during the colonial period, a new style of Sinhala letterforms emerged in opposition to the monolinear and geometric form that used high contrast and had varied thicknesses.

The high contrast style is still preferred for text typesetting in printed newspapers, books, and magazines in Sri Lanka.

[8] Today, the alphabet is used by over 16 million people to write Sinhala in very diverse contexts, such as newspapers, TV commercials, government announcements, graffiti, and schoolbooks.

Sinhala is the main language written in this script, but rare instances of its use for writing Sri Lanka Malay have been recorded.

To represent different sounds it is necessary to add vowel strokes, or diacritics called පිලි (Pili), that can be used before, after, above, or below the base-consonant.

Most of the Sinhala letters are curlicues; straight lines are almost completely absent from the alphabet, and it does not have joining characters.

This is because Sinhala used to be written on dried palm leaves, which would split along the veins on writing straight lines.

The śuddha also includes the letters and diacritics for the retroflex consonants ⟨ḷ⟩ and ⟨ṇ⟩, which are not phonemic in modern Sinhala but are needed for the representation of Eḷu.

The miśra siṃhala alphabet includes letters for Middle Indic aspirate, retroflex and sibilant consonants which are not found in modern Sinhala, but are used in the transcription of are used for transcribing loanwords from Sanskrit (tatsama), Pali or English.

While most diacritics are regular, ⟨ ු⟩, u and ⟨ ූ⟩ ū take on a different shape when attached to a ⟨ක⟩, ka, ⟨ග⟩, ga, ⟨ඟ⟩, n̆ga, ⟨ත⟩, ta, ⟨භ⟩, bha, or ⟨ශ⟩, śa.

The inherent vowel of a letter can be removed by a hal kirīma (◌්), which has two shapes depending on which consonant it attaches to.

Combinations of ර(r) or ළ(ḷ) with ⟨u⟩ have idiosyncratic shapes, viz රු (ru), රූ (rū), ළු (ḷu) and ළූ (ḷū).

The anusvara (often called binduva 'zero') is represented by one small circle ⟨◌ං⟩, [21] and the visarga (technically part of the miśra alphabet) by two ⟨◌ඃ⟩.

The Sinhala śuddha graphemes are named in a uniform way adding -yanna to the sound produced by the letter, including vocalic diacritics.

[23][24] Prior to the fall of Kandyan Kingdom all calculations were carried out using Sinhala lith illakkam.

The tradition of writing degrees and minutes of zodiac signs in lith numbers continued into the 20th century.

[26] Dental and retroflex voiced plosives are always rendered as ⟨d⟩, though, presumably because ⟨dh⟩ is not found as a representation of /ð/ in English orthography.

Successive copies of Buddhist texts follow the evolution of that version of Brahmi on the island, leading to modern Sinhala.

In Mac OS X, Sinhala font and keyboard support were provided by Nickshanks and Xenotypetech.

[31] In addition, newer versions of the Android mobile operating system also support both rendering and input of Sinhala script by default and applications like Helakuru serve as dedicated keyboard integrators.