Sri Lankan English or not? Lexical Choices and Negotiations in Postcolonial Women’s Writing in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Postcolonial studies as well as sociolinguists have long asserted the significance of language in postcolonial societies and the unquestionable power that language has in constructing reality. Both disciplines explore the complex and dynamic relationship between the English of the colonisers and the emerging World Englishes, and the process of adaptation and appropriation (Ashcroft et al. 1989, 1995, 2002) of the language which no longer belongs solely to what postcolonial studies refer to as the “Imperial centre” (Ashcroft et al. 1989, Boehmer 1995), or what World Englishes terms the “Inner Circle” or the “norm-providers” (Kachru 1982). Both disciplines have also acknowledged that the languages of postcolonial societies, whether it is their own indigenous languages or their adaptation of the coloniser’s language, offer postcolonial writers a much richer and more appropriate linguistic resource to express their own unique realities than the language of the imperial centre. (New 1978, Ashcroft et al 1995 and 2002, Boehmer 1995). Similarly, in World Englishes studies Kachru (1992) sees the positive and enriching effect of postcolonial adaptation of language which defines a new identity to the postcolonial writer: