Enhancement of Sri Lankan English vocabulary in Sri Lankan short stories and poems in English: A Morphological Analysis

Abstract

Sri Lankan English (SLE) was born through the contact between Standard British English (SBE) and the vernacular languages of Sri Lanka; Sinhala and Tamil. In the contemporary society, SLE has become the high yielding way of writing short stories and poems which are based on Sri Lankan contexts as a consequence of the prodigious use of English by Sinhala – English bilingual population in Sri Lanka. Thus, the primary objective of this study is to identify and analyze the enhancement of SLE in Sri Lankan short stories and poems in English by referring to five morphological processes. Therefore, this study aims at emphasizing the fact that the Sri Lankan writers in English tend to integrate the lexical items from Sinhala and Tamil languages in order to enhance the use of SLE lexicon in Sri Lankan literary compositions. Crucially, three short stories and three poems which comprise of SLE lexical items were selected as the sample of the study. Data gathering was done as a collaborative work by reading the selected short stories and poems in order to identify the SLE lexical items. Furthermore, a qualitative data analysis approach was implemented to identify the use of SLE lexical items in the selected sampleand they were analyzed by using charts according to the respective morphological process that they belong to. The analysis of the identified data demonstrated borrowing, hybridization, compounding, coinage, and literal translations as the most common morphological processesin the aforementioned sample while indicating borrowing as the most recurrent morphological process. Henceforth, this study investigates the manner in which the SLE morphological processes expose the Sri Lankan culture and tradition whilst playing a functional role in enhancing the lexical items of Sri Lankan short stories and poems in English.