Academic literature on the topic 'Colloquial Sinhala'

The causes of language influence that come under contact linguistics is a topic of common interest among linguistic academics nowadays. Sinhala is the majority language in Sri Lanka that has evolved over 2000 years and during this long retro, it has had both oriental and occidental language influences while the major impact has received from western languages after colonising the country. This piece of research employed two primary data collection methods: participatory observation and chunk recordings while collecting secondary data from the previous literature. As the sampling strategy, we used convenient sampling and the analytical technique of data was content analysis. The main objective of conducting this research was to find out the exact causes of the English language influence on modern colloquial Sinhala over the last 200 years. The study has established the main causes of English language influence on modern colloquial Sinhala as linguistic and cultural hegemony, colonisation, American expansion, superiority of social class, globalisation, commercial, industrial and religious factors while language contact is recognised as an umbrella term for these root causes. In conclusion, there have been two broad directions of these causes of English language influence that had taken place. At the beginning of the colonial rule, it had become top-bottom and now it has transferred to bottom-up, and the influence of English in the modern period on Sinhala has become complementary and multidimensional while the political influence behind the process in its nature is soft and arbitrary.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:The discourse I focus on in this study comes from interviews and ethnographic work with Sri Lankan university youth. While diglossia theory proves insufficient in depicting the way these youth mix ‘formal’ and ‘colloquial’ morphosyntactic features in the same social setting, Agha’s register approach to Sinhala optimally accounts for the specific dialogic effects speakers attach to linguistic features, suggesting such interdiscursive meaning combined with sociohistorical backgrounds of the varieties explains the registers’ composite recognition as divergent.

Colloquial Sinhala has focus concord constructions in which finite verbs with the suffix -e mark argument focus. In such constructions, the focal constituent is optionally marked via a focus particle, via movement to a postverbal (rather than preverbal) position, or via a combination of a focus particle and postverbal position. In this paper, I quantitatively analyze the preferred position of focal constituents marked by the three focus particles =yi, tamaa and tamai, as well as those not marked by any particle. Using data from a news website, I show that marking via a particle and the movement to the postverbal position are not randomly used. Rather, focal constituents marked by a focus particle are less likely to occur preverbally, while those not marked by a particle are more likely to occur postverbally. Moreover, among constituents marked by a focus particle, those marked by the particle =yi are more likely to occur postverbally. Based on these findings, I argue that the positional tendencies of focal constituents can be regarded as efficient marking patterns. When a constituent is marked by a focus particle, it is less likely to occur preverbally because the focal constituent is already explicit and the marking by the position would be redundant. The preference of =yi for the postverbal position does not seem to follow this general tendency until one takes into account that it requires less effort to produce =yi due to its phonological status. With this in mind, the distribution of constituents marked by =yi can also be regarded as an efficient pattern. The discussion in this paper contributes to both the typology of efficiency and the typology of optional focus marking.

According to the title of lower class people's history in literary works, Mrs. Rajam Krishnan's fictional painting "Alaivaik Karayil" is a biographical reference to the people of the fishery and Bharathavar clans, the lower class built along the coast at the border of the town. Sangam literature mentions Bharathavas as a division of Neithal (sea and land around the sea) people in Tamil Nadu. Living along the coast, the livelihood of the fishermen is based on the resources of the sea. The community of fishermen is a race that has not left the lap of the ocean mother who provides them life without settling in cities in search of livelihood. Toiling in the deep sea, enduring the vagaries of nature, drifting ashore, getting caught in nets, not being paid according to labour—there is no sure income for the labourer who is toiling in the sea. The scales of sharks are called thuvi. It is more valuable than fish. There is a compulsion to pay the thuvi and other things as a compulsory tax to the temple of Matha. Without trying to eliminate ignorance, addiction to drugs and sensuality, middleman troubles, the dominance of churches, resorting to drugs to forget life's dissatisfactions and disappointments, resistance to modern mechanised boats and the mechanised boat industry, etc. are considered to be the fuel of their greed. The status of referring to the power boat as a "Visapadaku", religious conversion, the pious fishermen who say "Mary is merciful," the religious fishermen, the inability to give dowry for the virgins, and conversion to Hinduism to escape the tax-extorting domination of the religious priests are implied. The fact that the author uses the same speech dialect after studying their speech reflects her fascinating experience. It has been shown that there are separate Tamil words that are not in our colloquial language today and that there is a separate case language that is a mixture of Portuguese, Sinhala, and Malayalam languages. The essence of this review article "Alaiyoram" is to explore the precious matters like pearls buried in the novelty in various situations.

This study is a detailed investigation of a number of issues in colloquial Sinhala morphosyntax. These issues primarily concern grammatical relations, argument structure, phrase structure and focus constructions. The theoretical framework of this study is Lexical Functional Grammar.¶ ...