Current Trends in Linguistic Research in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the current trends in linguistic research in Sri Lanka. Linguistics is studied as a major subject in the Universities of Kelaniya and Jaffna. The former maitains undergraduate and a post graduate programmes in linguistics; Research is done for post graduate degrees such as M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. Annually small scale research studies are done by about hundred M.A. students as a partial requirement of their study programme. Further, the number of researchers studying for their M.Phil. degree also has increased. As a result, research findings are presented in dissertation form and the university has got several hundreds of linguistic research dissertations. Yet, there has not been any formal study to find out the nature of these pieces of research and thus it would be very useful to find out the nature of them. Thus, the research problem in this study is ‘what is the nature of linguistic researches done during the last seven years in the University of Kelaniya?’ In order to answer this question details of researches done during the last seven years have been gathered from M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. Dissertations and classified into different subfields of linguistics. The present research is limited to research carried out from 2007 to 2014 in University of Kelaniya. The results indicate that research in the applied linguistic field are frequently done, yet there is an interest of the other theoretical and practical aspects of linguistics.