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Consonants

Sinhala has so-called prenasalised consonants, or 'half nasal' consonants. A short homorganic nasal occurs before a voiced stop, it is both shorter than a nasal alone and shorter than a sequence of nasal plus stop. The nasal is syllabified with the onset of the following syllable, which means that the moraic weight of the preceding syllable is left unchanged. For example, tam̆ba 'copper' contrasts with tamba 'boil'.

All consonants other than the prenasalised consonants, /ŋ/, /ɸ/, /h/, and /ʃ/ can be geminated (occur as double consonants), but only between vowels. In contexts that otherwise trigger gemination, prenasalised consonants become the corresponding nasal-voiced consonant sequence (e.g. /ⁿd/ is replaced with nd).

/ʃ/ is found in learned borrowings from Sanskrit, including in the honorific ශ්රී (śrī), found in phrases including the country's name, Sri Lanka (ශ්රී ලංකා, /ʃriː laŋkaː/). /f~ɸ/ is restricted to loans, typically for English. They are commonly sometimes replaced by /p/ and /s/ respectively. Some speakers use, as in English, and some use due to its similarity to the native / p /.