A Comparative Study of the Genitive and Locative Cases in Tamil and Sinhala

Tamil and Sinhala are members of the Asian language family and both are official languages in Sri Lanka. As morphologically rich languages, they express grammatical variations in both nouns and verbs through agglutinative and inflectional features. While Tamil and Sinhala share certain linguistic and lexical similarities, they also differ due to the unique characteristics of each language. Accordingly, both the affixation of case markers and the way nouns convey meaning through them in Tamil and Sinhala reveal notable similarities and differences. This study aims to examine the genitive and locative cases in the written forms of Tamil and Sinhala, and to explore how case markers are used in each language to express meaning. A qualitative approach was adopted, employing the observation method, with data collected from secondary sources to identify the case markers associated with these grammatical cases. The hypothesis of the research is that in Tamil, the genitive and locative cases have distinct case markers to indicate the grammatical form of the noun. In contrast, Sinhala uses the same case markers for both the genitive and locative cases to express the grammatical meaning of the noun.