singlish-sinhala

High-performance Singlish → Sinhala transliteration engine compiled to WebAssembly.

• 🚀 Runs 100% client-side — near-native speed, zero network calls, no server, no tracking
• 🎯 ~100-word curated dictionary with exact spellings (ayubowan → ආයුබෝවන්)
• 💡 Suggestion candidates for ambiguous words (t/d/n, th, sh …)
• 🔁 Reverse transliteration: Sinhala → Singlish
• 🧩 IME-ready syllable chunks for per-chunk backspace handling
• 🦀 Built with Rust + wasm-bindgen; ships with TypeScript declarations

Install

npm install singlish-sinhala

Quick start — Browser (bundler / Vite / webpack)

import init, { transliterate } from 'singlish-sinhala';

await init(); // loads and instantiates the .wasm
transliterate('kohomada oya?'); // "කොහොමද ඔය?"

Quick start — CDN (no build step)

<script type="module">
  import init, { transliterate } from 'https://esm.sh/singlish-sinhala';
  await init();
  document.querySelector('#out').textContent = transliterate('ayubowan');
</script>

Quick start — Node.js (18+)

import init, { transliterate } from 'singlish-sinhala';
import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises';

const wasm = await readFile(
  new URL('./node_modules/singlish-sinhala/singlish_core_bg.wasm', import.meta.url)
);
await init(wasm); // pass the .wasm bytes directly

API

| Function | Description | Example | | --- | --- | --- | | transliterate(text) | Full-string Singlish → Sinhala; preserves spaces & punctuation | "kohomada oya?" → "කොහොමද ඔය?" | | transliterate_word(word) | Single word, dictionary-aware | "ayubowan" → "ආයුබෝවන්" | | candidates(word) | Up to 5 suggestions for ambiguous words (primary first) | "kotha" → ["කොත","කොථ","කොට"] | | reverse_transliterate(text) | Sinhala → Singlish (best-effort, follows forward convention) | "සිංහල" → "singhala" | | split_chunks(word) | Sinhala syllable chunks; combining marks attach to their base (IME backspace) | "kohomada" → ["කො","හො","ම","ද"] | | is_sinhala_text(text) | true when ≥50% of non-space chars are Sinhala | "කොහොමද" → true | | sinhala_char_count(text) | Count of Sinhala-range characters | "කොහොමද hello" → 6 | | transliterate_batch(words) | Bulk word conversion in one call | ["kohomada","bath"] → ["කොහොමද","බත්"] | | version() | Engine version string | "0.3.0" |

Typing conventions

• Vowels — signs attach to the preceding consonant: ka→ක, kaa→කා, kae→කැ, ke→කෙ, koo→කෝ Standalone: a→අ, aa→ආ, ae→ඇ, i→ඉ, u→උ, e→එ, o→ඔ
• Consonant digraphs — ch→ච, kh→ඛ, gh→ඝ, th→ත, dh→ධ, sh→ශ, bh→භ, ph→ඵ, gn/ny→ඤ
• Nasals — ng→ං (sing→සිං), nk→ංක (lanka→ලංක)
• Gemination — kka→ක්ක, amma→අම්මා
• Final consonant — gets virama: k→ක්
• Case-insensitive — Sri and sri behave identically

Dictionary

Common words resolve to their exact Sinhala spellings instead of phonetic guesses: ayubowan→ආයුබෝවන්, sri lanka→ශ්රී ලංකා, colombo→කොළඹ, kandy→මහනුවර, amma→අම්මා, machang→මචං, thambili→තැඹිලි, singhala→සිංහල …

Demo

A full demo page (live typing, suggestions, direction toggle, copy) ships with the source repo. To run it:

cd singlish-core
wasm-pack build --target web
cd ..
python3 -m http.server 8000   # then open http://localhost:8000

License

MIT