Loan words in Sri Lankan Tamil came about mostly due contact between colonial powers and the native population. Linguists study a language's lexicon for a number of reasons. Languages such as Tamil with centuries of literature and multi-cultural contact offer the chance to compare the various processes of lexical change. The words of foreign origin or loanwords illustrate those processes: calques, loanwords, the distinction between function words and content words.
Note: For information on the transcription used, see National Library at Calcutta romanization and Tamil script.
Sri Lankan Tamil dialects are distinct from the Tamil dialects used in Tamil Nadu, India. They are used in Sri Lanka and in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Linguistic borrowings from European colonizers such as the Portuguese, English and the Dutch have also contributed to a unique vocabulary that is distinct from the colloquial usage of Tamil in the Indian mainland. Furthermore, a form of Tamil spoken exclusively by Sri Lankan Moors has been strongly influenced by Arabic. Words that are peculiar to Sri Lankan Tamil dialects are marked with an asterisk (*).
Most Portuguese loan words are for items the native population lacked when the encounter happened c. 1505. Some are administrative terms, others are personal usage terms as well as items directly introduced from South America via the Portuguese traders. Most of these words are also shared with Sinhalese language users.
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Sri Lankan Tamil dialects use countless number of English words; following are some of the unique ones.
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Black July induced civil conflict has introduced number of English and international words to the native population.
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Loanwords from the neighbouring Indo-European Sinhala are quite sparse in Sri Lankan Tamil (as opposed to the large number of Tamil loan words in Sinhala), which is most likely due to the relative isolation of the exclusively Tamil-speaking settlements in the North and East of the island.
There are also a few words from the Malay language. Malay words for edible fruits were introduced during the colonial period by traders [citation needed]. The same terminology is shared with Sinhalese.