Tamlish in popular tamil media

Abstract

In the last few decades Tamlish -switching of code from Tamil to English- has been becoming an attractive phenomenon among the Tamil native speakers of Sri Lanka. Code mixing takes place especially among the younger generation of this society. Tamlish is used frequently in popular Tamil media and they communicate with the masses effectively. People use Tamlish for many reasons. The lack of knowledge in vocabulary of both codes might be the main reason. However, social pressures, prestige and honor related to English in our country, the difficulty of getting proper vocabulary, especially for technical terms could be some other reasons. This research is based on the data collected from “SMS Galaata” a television program of Shakthi TV, which is one of the popular Tamil television channels of Sri Lanka. This research is restricted since it deals only with the above mentioned program. However, one of the findings is the emerging trend of code mixing at lexical, syntactical and phonological levels. For example, Verb: try pannu (to try), dedicate pannu (to dedicate) Adverbial blend: sweet-aa (sweetly), quick-aa (quickly) Phrases: Line busy taane? (Telephone line is busy, Is that so?) Hello anna unga voice super. (Hello, elder brother. your voice is excellent) This paper attempts to explore the linguistic features of code mixing and the linguistic domination of English over Tamil language in the mass media.