Sinhalese and Tamil languages, which are the Official Languages of Sri Lanka, comprise of non‑Romanized alphabets. Since the correct Sinhalese/Tamil pronunciation is not produced when the geographical names of such as, villages, towns and rivers in Sri Lanka are written using English characters, writing in English characters in accordance with a standardized system to produce the correct pronunciation is known as the Romanization System.
This system is already being used to write geographical names in the Tamil language. As such, the proposal made by Hon. Gayantha Karunathilaka, the Minister of Lands and Parliamentary Reforms, to propose the use of Romanization System for writing the geographical names in the Sinhalese language to enable the use of such names internationally and to propose the same, at the United Nations Conference on Standardization, was approved by the Cabinet.
The Government official news portal is maintains by the New Media Unit of the Department of Government Information and it was titled "news.lk" and commenced in mid1996 and release to Internet from March 01st, 1997.
News.lk publishes in three languages – Sinhala, Tamil and English.
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