Abstract:
Negombo Fishermen‘s Tamil (hereafter NFT) and Sri Lanka Gypsy Telugu (hereafter SLGT)
are two less-studied Dravidian dialects from very different sociological contexts in majority
Sinhalese areas of Sri Lanka. Both of these dialects have undergone significant grammatical
and lexical changes as a result of contact with Sinhala (NFT and SLGT speaker communities
are both bilingual, with Sinhala as the language used outside of intimate community
circumstances), but both the degree and nature of these changes are very different, owing to
differing degrees of intensity of contact and the very different sociological roles played by
these communities vis-à-vis the Sinhalese. In the case of NFT, which this researcher
documented via intensive in-field elicitation and recording of conversation in Negombo in
2000-2001, the Sinhala-influenced lexical and grammatical changes are pervasive. Not
surprisingly, the NFT speaker community, largely Roman Catholic, self-identifies as Sinhala
and frequently intermarries with Sinhalese in the Negombo area. They are typically fisher
folk who are an integral part of the local economy. By contrast, the SLGT speaker
community living in Kudagama near Anuradhapura (where this researcher began field
documentation in February 2001), although now largely Buddhist, maintains itself as a
―gypsy‖ community apart from the Sinhalese; many in the community still practice the
traditional occupations of snake charming and monkey dancing, and endogamy is still
preferred. SLGT, while importing many Sinhala words, has not imported nearly as many
grammatical features as has NFT. This paper compares and contrasts the sociolinguistic
circumstances of these two less-studied Sri Lankan minority communities, and concludes that
contact-induced language change is primarily oriented towards lexical borrowing in cases of
weak societal assimilation (SLGT), and towards morphosyntactic borrowing in cases of
strong societal assimilation (NFT).
