A Linguistic study on the nature of WhatsApp Language of Sri Lankans

Abstract

WhatsApp has occupied an important place among other social media platforms at present. It is mainly used to maintain conversations between various types of groups. The main objective of the research study is studying the informal language which is created using a mixture of letters and studying how the meaning is generated through the aforementioned informal letter combination. The research methodology which has been followed in the research is studying dialogues and group conversations in WhatsApp accounts. Though the participants in these conversations have used Sinhala language, they are not the real Sinhala words in terms of the vocabulary. Similarly, there are English letters which cannot be considered real English words. If it is so, how do these members communicate through this system without misunderstanding? A person who is proficient in his or her Sinhala and English language ability could not identify these WhatsApp messages if he or she could not understand this WhatsApp language. Thus, the issues would be, what has resulted in this situation? what language rules have been used to create these conversations meaningfully? In this qualitative study, typing Sinhala words using English letters was done. However, in these conversations the complete word is also unavailable. Only two or three letters are used for a word which consist seven or eight letters. In such condition receiver of this message is identifying this message clearly and meaningfully without any doubt. Result of the research has proved that the general knowledge of sender and receiver on their native language, with the assistance of pragmatics and conversational implicatures, have helped them to understand this conversation.