Code-Switching and Code-Mixing among the Sri Lankan Sinhala Speakers

Abstract

As occurring in every bilingual community, in Sri Lanka, too, code-mixing and code switching in speech, has become a common phenomenon, specially, among the Sri Lankan Sinhala speakers. They mix Sinhala and English often when they communicate and it has become a threat to our mother-tongue Sinhala. This paper focuses on how the Sri Lankan Sinhalese mix codes in speech the investigations of their speech patterns, and how code switching and code mixing has become a threat to the mother- tongue. A maj or aim of this study is to find out the possible causes, why and how people code switch or mix in discourse. It is shown that from a socio-functional perspective, the bilingual may use code -mixing for expressing modernization. In the second part of this study the characteristic features of the code- mixers and code-switchers are considered phonologically, morphologically and syntactically. The next section discusses how the attitudes of people towards code-mixing has changed from negative to positive and that it has imposed itself as the norm of language use in most bilingual - communities. Finally, this study discusses briefly the impact of code-mixing on language structure. A survey of the literature on code-mixing in different bilingual communities reveals that the use of code-mixing normally brings changes and innovations in the language structure.