The cumulative effort over the past few decades that has gone into developing linguistic resources for tasks ranging from machine- readable dictionaries to translation systems is enormous. Such effort is prohibitively expensive for languages outside the (largely) European family. The possibility of building such resources automatically by accessing electronic corpora of such languages is therefore of great interest to those involved in studying these 'new' - 'lesser known' languages. The main stumbling block to applying these data- driven techniques directly is that most of them require large corpora rarely available for such 'new' languages. This paper describes an attempt at setting up a bootstrapping agenda to exploit the scarce corpus resources that may be available at the outset to a researcher concerned with such languages. More specifically, it reports on the results of an experiment to use state-of-the-art data-driven techniques for building linguistic resources for Sinhala - a non-European language with virtually no electronic resources.