When a systematic field study was conducted in 1959, the language was confined to the older generation of Veddas from Dambana.

This is evident by the presence of both lexical and structural elements in Sinhalese which cannot be traced to either Indo-Aryan or neighboring Dravidian languages.

It is unknown which languages were spoken in Sri Lanka before it was settled by Prakrit-speaking immigrants in the 5th century BCE.

[9][10] 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.

[11] Robert Knox, an Englishman held captive by a Kandyan king, wrote in 1681 that the wild and settled Veddas spoke the language of the Sinhalese people.

[12] Robert Percival wrote in 1803 that the Veddas, although seemingly speaking a broken dialect of Sinhalese, amongst themselves spoke a language that was known only to them.

[14] The first systematic attempt at studying the Vedda language was undertaken by Hugh Neville, an English civil servant in British Ceylon.

[15] 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 Sinhalese, but he also noted words of unique origin, which he assigned to the original language of the Veddas.

[17] 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:[18] according to him, the language was restricted to the older generation of people from the Dambana region, with the younger generation shifting to Sinhalese, 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.

[9][note 2] The Vedda community or the indigenous population of Sri Lanka is said to have inhabited the island prior to the arrival of the Aryans in the 5th century B.C.

and after the collapse of the dry zone civilization in the 15th century, they have extended their settlements once more in the North Central, Uva and Eastern regions.

[23] A pidgin[24] is spoken natively by an entire speech community, whose ancestors have been geographically displaced through which a rupture is created in their relationship with their original language.

Here it is also important to acknowledge the existence of many issues in relation to the process of creolization that remain unresolved in the domain of linguistics.

However based on recent studies conducted on the Vedda community, it has been revealed that the Vedda language is on the verge of facing extinction since the younger generation is keen on using Sinhala or Tamil as their first language, being influenced by the dominant language of the region of residence due to an array of reasons including fragmentation of settlements, economic policies, national education structure and political factors of the country.

[27] The preponderance of the palatal affricates is explained as a remainder from days when the original Vedda language had a high frequency of such phonemes.

For example:[34] Vedda maintains in its lexicon archaic Sinhalese words that are no longer in daily usage.

Other common words are rera for 'wild duck' and gala for 'stones' in toponyms found throughout the island (although others have also suggested a Dravidian origin).

[41][42][43] There are also high frequency words denoting body parts in Sinhalese such as oluva for 'head', kakula for 'leg', bella for 'neck' and kalava for 'thighs' that are derived from pre-Sinhalese languages of Sri Lanka.