The Sinhala Only Act (formally the Official Language Act No. 33 of 1956) was an act passed in the Parliament of Ceylon in 1956. The act replaced English as the official language of Ceylon with Sinhala. The act failed to give official recognition to Tamil, which had not received official recognition before.
Sinhala is the language of Ceylon's (now Sri Lanka) majority Sinhalese ethnic group, who then accounted for around 70% of the country's population. Tamil is the mother tongue of Ceylon's three largest minority ethnic groups (Indian Tamil, Sri Lankan Tamil and Moors), who together accounted for around 29% of the country's population.
The act was controversial as supporters of the act saw it as an attempt by a community that had just gained independence to distance themselves from their colonial masters, while its opponents viewed it as an attempt by the linguistic majority to oppress and assert dominance on minorities. The Act symbolizes the post independent majority Sinhalese to assert its Sri Lanka's identity as a nation state, and for Tamils, it became a symbol of minority oppression and a justification for them to demand a separate nation state, which resulted in decades of civil war.
Read more about Sinhala Only Act: British Rule, Ceylon After Independence, Enactment, Tamil and Sinhalese Opposition To The Act, Partial Reversal in 1958, Effect, Languages Today, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the word act:
“There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating; accumulators act at random. The Collyer brothers, who died among the tons of newspapers and trash with which they filled every cubic foot of their house so that they could scarcely move, were a classic example of accumulators, but there are many of us whose houses are filled with all manner of things that we “can’t bear to throw away.””
—Russell Lynes (1910–1991)