Abstract
The commercial Sinhala-medium FM radio practice of code-mixing between Sinhala and English is criticised by some of the mainstream Sinhala-speaking groups of Sri Lanka as unrestrained and thus causing the degeneration of the native language of Sinhala. Regardless of this disapproval, this new style of code-mixing has now spread into the FM media audiences, particularly its youth groups, among whom it is a daily linguistic reality. A previous study explored the nature of this new mode of code-mixing set off against conventional code-mixing of Sinhala-English bilinguals of the country. The present paper makes an attempt to consolidate the findings of the study through a combination of theories, one which explores the Extra Linguistic Power ascribed to some languages or language varieties while marginalising others, and the other on Language as Resistance. Quantitative tools were employed to compare the linguistic features of FM code-mixing and conventional bilingual code-mixing. A qualitative description is provided of the way these differences are perceived by the relevant groups. Thus, the study presumes to communicate important information about the motives and driving forces behind language standards, media agendas, audiences and the dynamics of language policies and practices in Sri Lanka.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Indira Mawelle is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka. She received her PhD in 2017, and has published in local and international journals on language crossing and related issues. Her current research interests are translating the cultural text and the impact of culture on language.
Notes
1 The advent of the British in Sri Lanka was in 1796, but it was in 1802 that the country was officially declared a British Crown Colony (Fernando, Citation1982, p. 341). The British rule prevailed in the country until its Independence in 1948.
2 A minimal bilingual is ‘someone with only a few words and phrases from a second language’ whereas a receptive, or passive bilingual is a person ‘who understands a second language in either its spoken or written form, or both, but does not necessarily speak or write it’ (Wei, Citation2000, p. 5). Fernando (Citation1982) uses the term ‘receiver bilingual’ for ‘receptive bilingual’.
3 Gardner-Chloros et al. (Citation2005), Meeuwis and Blommaert (Citation1998), McClure and McClure (Citation1988), Zentella (Citation1997), Wei (Citation1994), Poplack (1988) and Auer (Citation1984) among many others, have conducted some of the seminal sociolinguistic/ethnographic studies on code-switching; Milroy and Gordon (Citation2003), McCormick (Citation2002), Myers-Scotton (Citation1993) and Gardner-Chloros et al. (Citation2000) are among the researchers who have explored its pragmatics aspect; Myers-Scotton and Jake (Citation2009), MacSwan (Citation2000, Citation2005), Belazi et al. (Citation1994), Sankoff and Poplack (Citation1981), Poplack (Citation1980) and Pfaff (Citation1979), among many others, have studied its grammatical features.
4 Androutsopoulos (Citation2007) and Mahootian (Citation2005) have conducted significant research pertaining to code-mixing on mass media.
6 The television was introduced to the country in the early 1980s.
7 Census of Population and Housing of Sri Lanka 2012, Department of Census & Statistics, Sri Lanka.
8 ‘Urban’ which generally means ‘to be living in a town or city’ is not applied exclusively to the city of Colombo in this study, and includes towns such as Kandy and Galle which are equally and highly ‘urban’.
9 The extraction of audio samples was done in the previous study mentioned in the abstract (Mawelle, Citation2017).
10 In order to elicit information with regard to perspectives, the questionnaire included questions (originally given in Sinhala, and translated into English for this article) such as: Of the two language Sinhala (S) and English (E), which language would you associate with the following attributes: intelligent, smart, friendly, educated, confident, fashionable, modern, important, cherished.
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Funding
Association for Language Awareness (ALA); World Bank Group.
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