Sri Lankan English: a distinct South Asian variety

MICHAEL MEYLER

Identifying and describing Sri Lankan English

Introduction the argument for the recognition of Sri Lankan English as a distinct variety of English, and to In November 2007, I discuss some of the practical issues encoun- published a book tered in compiling a dictionary of this nature.2 called A Dictionary of Sri Lankan English.1 The dictionary con- Sri Lankan English: Attitudes, tains approximately awareness, research 2,500 examples of words and expres- It will not come as a surprise to readers of this sions which are char- journal that such a thing as Sri Lankan English acteristic of the (SLE) exists. What would perhaps be surpris- English spoken in Sri ing is the controversy surrounding the issue in Lanka. It is not itself, which involves the resistance intended to be a work in certain quarters to the idea that SLE of purely academic deserves to be recognized as a separate variety, interest, and, accordingly, it avoids as much and the lack of awareness (even amongst its linguistic jargon as possible. The dictionary is own users) of its distinctive features. This is intended to be accessible to the general reader, due perhaps in part to the lack of any kind of and will hopefully be of interest to foreigners codification of SLE up to now. Academics have living in Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan students and been writing about SLE since around the time teachers of English, and anyone with an inter- of independence in 1948, but few books have est in international varieties of English. Every been published on the subject for the general entry is glossed with reference to so-called reader, with the notable exception of Manique ‘standard’ , together with a pro- nunciation guide, examples of usage, quotes from published books, illustrations, and fur- MICHAEL MEYLER first went ther notes. There is also an introduction outlin- to Sri Lanka in 1985 as an English teacher, ing the main features of Sri Lankan English. after graduating in Modern To coincide with the publication of the dic- from Cambridge tionary, I launched an associated website – University. He also worked as www.mirisgala.net – which includes informa- a Sinhala interpreter with tion about the book, photographs of many ICRC, and then spent two items in the book, and most importantly a page years in Edinburgh, where he of updates, corrections and new entries, based did a Diploma in ELT, worked partly on feedback from readers. I hope that as a contributor to the ‘Oxford Wordfinder the website will mean that an updated edition Dictionary’, and started work on his own dictionary of the book itself will not be necessary, at least of Sri Lankan English. In 1995 he joined the British Council in , where he now teaches for a number of years. beginners’ courses in colloquial Sinhala and Tamil. The main aims of this paper are to present

doi:10.1017/S0266078409990447 English Today 100, Vol. 25, No. 4 (December 2009). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2009 Cambridge University Press 55 Gunesekera’s book The Post-Colonial Identity of more memorably known as ‘SLICE’ – the Sri Sri Lankan English (Katha Publishers 2004), Lankan component of the International Corpus which, together with my dictionary, are the of English. Work has been ongoing for a num- only books currently available on the subject in ber of years, and is currently being undertaken Sri Lanka. This is in striking contrast to India, at the University of Giessen in Germany. The where research on dates back to 400,000-word written component of the cor- Hobson Jobson in the 19th century, and pus is expected to be completed this year. This numerous books and dictionaries are available. will be a valuable source of empirical data for My edition of the Oxford Advanced Learners’ researchers. Unfortunately, though, the spo- Dictionary (OUP 1996) even comes with a 42- ken component of a further 600,000 words is page Indian English supplement. likely to take much longer to complete. My impression is that in recent years there has been increasing awareness of Sri Lankan Sri Lankan English: the regional English in academic circles. But there is still a context lot of resistance to the concept elsewhere – both internal resistance among speakers of SLE Sri Lankan English belongs to the family of themselves, and external resistance from the South Asian Englishes, of which Indian English rest of the English-speaking world. In Sri Lanka is the best known and most established exam- the term ‘Sri Lankan English’ still carries con- ple – although Indian English itself is of course notations of ‘broken English’, something sub- hugely diverse. Indian English and Sri Lankan standard and inferior. Many speakers of SLE English have much in common, as both vari- do not like to be told that is what they speak, eties evolved from the English of the British and most learners of the language aspire to colonials of the nineteenth century, and much speak ‘British English’ and nothing less! Unfor- common vocabulary developed to describe the tunately, this attitude is exacerbated by the common flora and fauna of the two countries, fact that many teachers (both local and for- as well as their shared religious and cultural eign) tend to share the same view. aspects. Both varieties include a number of Outside Sri Lanka, there is virtually nothing words of Tamil origin, and many others to show that SLE even exists. Many people are derived from roots. ignorant of the fact that there are a significant One might expect Indian and Sri Lankan number of people in Sri Lanka who actually English to be almost identical. And indeed that speak English as their first language, and where is the assumption of much that has been writ- this is acknowledged, it is generally assumed ten on the subject of . There is to be some sort of sub-variety of Indian English. a tendency to think of Sri Lankan English as Part of the problem has always been the lack of being just a sub-variety of Indian English, an documented evidence showing that SLE exists, impression encouraged by the relative lack of and identifying the features that define it. documentary evidence of SLE as an indepen- The question of attitudes and awareness is dent variety. Anyone who is familiar with both particularly relevant in the field of education. varieties will be aware that this is not the case. Dinali Fernando, one of the editors of my dic- In fact it seems to me that in the years since tionary, is the author of an unpublished study independence there has been remarkably little titled ‘Sri Lankan English in the Sri Lankan cross-fertilization between the two, and Sri classroom: a study of teachers’ awareness of Lankan English has forged its own quite inde- their own variety’, in which she shows that pendent identity. However, this may change while Sri Lankan teachers of English are gener- with the increasing economic power of India, ally positive in their attitude towards SLE, they as the popularity of Indian satellite TV chan- remain relatively unaware of what exactly it nels is starting to expose Sri Lankans to more consists of, and how it differs from standard Indian English. English. Another difference that is worth mentioning My hope is that my dictionary of Sri Lankan is the linguistic context in which English exists English may help to raise awareness of the fea- in India and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is essentially tures of SLE among teachers, learners and a trilingual country. Apart from a very small users of English in Sri Lanka. Probably the next minority (e.g. speakers of Sri Lankan Malay) significant step will be the completion of the most people speak one, two or three lan- written component of ICE-SL – previously and guages, and that is all they are ever likely to

56 ENGLISH TODAY 100 December 2009 need. In India, there are hundreds or even word is very common in everyday written and thousands of different languages and dialects, spoken SLE. But interestingly the Hindi word and many people encounter several of them on crore (meaning 100 , or 10 million) – a regular basis in different situations. In this which is equally common in Indian English – is respect Sri Lanka may be closer to places like hardly used in Sri Lanka. There is also a differ- Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, each of ence in the way the word is used. In which has three or four major languages. In the Indian English it is used in the same way as case of Singapore and Malaysia, three of the equivalent words such as thousand and mil- four major languages (English, Malay and lion: ‘six lakh rupees’. But in SLE this would Tamil) are also found in Sri Lanka. Something normally be expressed as ‘six lakhs of rupees’. else that Sri Lanka shares with Hong Kong, Sin- These examples from a quick Google search gapore and Malaysia is the relative lack of illustrate the difference: recognition and acceptance of the local variety ● Private security industry generating 10 lakh of English – unlike India, where Indian English jobs every year (Economic Times, India) has long been recognized as an established ● More than two lakhs of patients attend this variety of English, and has been well docu- hospital for treatment in a year. (jaffnan- mented ever since Hobson Jobson. There is a gos.org, Sri Lanka) widely held perception in all these countries that British and are the only In the area of phonology, SLE differs from valid varieties, and all three communities – like Indian English in the pronunciation of ‘r’ Sri Lanka – face major issues surrounding the sounds. In SLE, as in standard British English official status of English and the use of English pronunciation and in Welsh, Australian and as a medium of instruction in schools. , the letter ‘r’ is not pro- nounced in words like mother, card and earth, as is common in Scottish, Irish, American and Features of Sri Lankan English many varieties of Indian English. In addition, Three major examples of the specific features SLE does not normally include a ‘linking r’ in that distinguish Sri Lankan English from phrases such as these: mother and father, here Indian English are (i) the high frequency of and there, four or five, you better ask, etc. In Sinhala loanwords, (ii) differences in the usage standard British English pronunciation, the of shared vocabulary, and (iii) the pronuncia- final ‘r’ is pronounced in these cases where it is tion of ‘r’ in SLE. followed by an initial vowel in the next word, The most obvious unique characteristic of while in SLE the ‘r’ is not pronounced. SLE is the sheer number of Sinhala loanwords I have mentioned three specific examples that it includes. This is not surprising: Sinhala where SLE differs in some way from Indian and is after all the majority language of Sri Lanka, other varieties of English. But it would be and since it is not spoken anywhere else, these wrong to say that any variety of English con- words are likely to be unique to the island. sists only of those features which are unique to These words refer especially to the flora and that variety. What distinguishes any variety of fauna of the country, to different types of food English is the particular combination of lexical, and drink, and to Buddhism, the majority reli- grammatical and phonological features that it gion of the country. SLE also includes loan- comprises – including those features which are words from Tamil, Hindi, Malay, , shared with other varieties. In the case of SLE, Dutch, Portuguese and other languages, but this includes many features of standard con- most of these are likely to be common to other temporary British English; others which date varieties of South Asian and/or South-East back to the English of the British colonial Asian English. period, including Anglo-Indian and other items A more specific distinction is seen in the way which are also found in contemporary Indian certain words shared by Indian and Sri Lankan English; words of Sinhala origin which are English are used. Take the word lakh for unique to Sri Lanka, as well as words of Tamil instance. This Hindi word means one hundred and Hindi origin which are also used in India, thousand, and even the way it is written words of Malay, Dutch and Portuguese origin numerically (1,00,000), is different from the which are also used in South-East Asia, and standard British (and international) conven- words of Arabic origin which are part of inter- tion for writing this number (100,000). The national Muslim English. Finally, it includes

SRI LANKAN ENGLISH: A DISTINCT SOUTH ASIAN VARIETY 57 many collocations which, while not necessarily and we are used to looking up words in the dic- unique to SLE, lend Sri Lankan discourse a dis- tionary to check their correct spelling. The tinctively ‘local’ flavour simply because of the problem for the dictionary maker, however, is frequency with which they are used. In the how to spell a word of non-English origin like course of compiling my dictionary, I found that aachchi (grandmother) or thaaththa (father) collocations such as these were a particularly which does not yet appear in any dictionary, rich source, collectively bestowing on SLE its and which is normally used only in spoken con- own unique identity. texts. There is clearly a dilemma in attempting For example, collocations of the words to strike a balance between being consistent in coconut, rice and tea tell an interesting story. If spelling conventions, and reflecting actual you look up coconut in a standard British dic- usage, which is far from consistent. In the end, tionary, what do you find? Coconut matting, it often comes down to the lexicographer’s own coconut milk, and coconut shy! You don’t even subjective decision. find coconut tree, which is surely common to many varieties of English, but which in stan- dard British English is referred to as a ‘palm Another issue is where one draws the line tree’. And coconut milk is often wrongly defined between what is an acceptable example of Sri in British dictionaries as ‘the liquid inside a Lankan English on the one hand, and what is coconut’, which is referred to as coconut water better described as an ‘error’ on the other. I in Sri Lanka. Coconut milk, on the other hand, was particularly aware of this issue because of is the liquid made by squeezing grated coconut what I mentioned earlier: the reluctance with water, a basic ingredient of many Sri among Sri Lankans to accept SLE as a distinct Lankan curries. Apart from coconut tree and variety, and the belief that ‘Sri Lankan English’ coconut milk, the word coconut is also found in equates with ‘learner English’ or ‘broken Eng- a wide variety of other collocations in SLE: lish’. As a British English speaker myself, and coconut arrack, coconut estate, coconut husk, teaching English at the British Council, there coconut oil, coconut sambol, coconut scraper, was a danger that many readers would inter- coconut shell, coconut toddy, and many others. pret my dictionary in terms of right and wrong, We find a similar multiplicity when it comes which was not the idea. For myself, my inten- to rice and tea. In British English, we have a rel- tion was simply to describe the way the English atively small set of collocations for rice, includ- language is used in Sri Lanka, without making ing rice field, rice paper, and rice pudding (none any judgements about what might be regarded of which are used in SLE). Whereas in Sri as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. Lankan English, one has rice belly, rice cooker, However, merely by deciding to include a rice flour, rice mill, rice packet, rice puller, etc. In particular word or expression, the compiler is the case of tea, British English gives us teabag, inevitably bestowing upon it with the seal of tea break, tea cloth, tea cosy, teacup, tea party, acceptability. My dictionary includes many fea- teapot, teashop, teaspoon, tea table, teatime, tea tures of colloquial SLE which would be recog- towel, and tea trolley (all of which relate to the nized as mistakes by teachers (and examiners) national habit of drinking a cuppa). Sri Lankan of , and indeed by many English, by contrast, has tea country, tea dust, speakers of standard SLE. For example: tea estate, tea factory, tea leaves, and tea plucker ● (all of which refer to the production process). I’m having a fever. ● I wish I don’t have to go. ● He told he’ll definitely come. Setting standards for Sri Lankan ● Lot of problems are there. English ● She is three years elder to me. ● You must be knowing him. In compiling the Dictionary of Sri Lankan ● You better ask from your father. English, it was necessary for me to make deci- ● You’ll come, no? tomorrow. sions about how words should be spelt, as well ● Can’t with these children! as matters of grammatical usage. ● Raining so no tennis. ● Haven’t any rice. Spelling These features are marked ‘(coll.)’ in the dic- More than any other, spelling is one area where tionary, showing that while they may be com- dictionaries are expected to be prescriptive, mon features of the colloquial language, they

58 ENGLISH TODAY 100 December 2009 Figures 1 and 2: Sri Lankan English – ma to Mahapola would not necessarily be considered accept- cross-references written in bold type; example able in a more formal written context. Others, phrases and sentences written in italics; notes such as these examples of the use of tenses, comparing Sri Lankan and British usage; and may also be found in written contexts: quotes from a selection of 30 published works ● The robbers had escaped in a white van. of fiction. The latter are all novels and collec- ● An important letter can arrive this week. tions of short stories published between 1982 ● Application forms could be obtained from the and 2006; set mostly or entirely in a Sri Lankan secretary. context; and written by Sri Lankan authors, or ● This email address would not be valid from authors of Sri Lankan origin living abroad. next week. ● I knew the car will be there, and sure enough it was. Sri Lankan English literature I believe that including such features is the best The Singaporean poet Edwin Thumboo, speak- way to reflect the way that English is actually ing at the Hong Kong International Association used in the current Sri Lankan context. The for World Englishes (IAWE) conference in excerpts from the dictionary shown above December 2008, commented that it is often lit- illustrate the way in which the volume is set erature that leads the way in establishing and out, and the way in which commentary on Sri standardizing a new variety of English. Many Lankan vocabulary and grammar is incorpo- loanwords from indigenous languages, and rated into the text. As these excerpts show, all many colloquial expressions and creative of the entries contain some or all of the follow- coinages, first find their way into print in fic- ing features: a pronunciation guide (written in tion. In choosing to illustrate entries in my dic- the phonetic font which I developed myself tionary with quotes from English-language Sri for writing Sinhala and Tamil phonetically); Lankan fiction, I realise in retrospect that in a

SRI LANKAN ENGLISH: A DISTINCT SOUTH ASIAN VARIETY 59 small way I have documented a part of this given at the conference of the International Associ- process. ation of World Englishes (Hong Kong, December English literature in Sri Lanka still has a way 2008) and at the Galle Literary Festival (Galle, Sri to go when compared to India, with its extra- Lanka, January 2009). ordinary array of internationally recognized A bibliography of literary sources for the English-language writers: Amit Chaudhuri, Dictionary Amitav Ghosh, Anita and Kiran Desai, Rohin- ton Mistry, R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Quotations given in the dictionary are taken from the books listed below. Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Seth, to name a few. One of the problems is the widely held Abeysekara, Tissa. 1998. Bringing Tony Home. Author’s feeling that Sri Lankan English is not appropri- publication. Amarasekara, Gunadasa. 2003. Out of the Darkness. Sri ate in the context of creative writing. But there Lanka: Visidunu. are a number of English-language writers who Blacker, David. 2005. A Cause Untrue. Colombo: Perera are starting to forge a Sri Lankan fictional iden- Hussein. tity in their work, and who have in the process Cambrai, Jeanne. 2001. Murder in the Pettah. New helped to define the identity of SLE itself. Delhi: Penguin. De Kretser, Michelle. 2003. The Hamilton Case. Apart from diasporic writers like Michael London: Vintage. Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Shyam Sel- De Silva, Nihal. 2004. The Far Spent Day. Colombo: vadurai and Michelle de Kretser, others writing Vijitha Yapa. locally, and employing a more authentically Sri —. 2005. The Ginirälla Conspiracy. Colombo: Vijitha Lankan idiom, include Yasmine Gooneratne, Yapa —. 2006. Paduma Meets the Sunbird. Colombo: Ameena Hussein, Lal Medawattegedera, Carl Popsicle Books. Muller, and Manuka Wijesinghe. —. 2003. The Road from Elephant Pass. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa. Fernando, Vijita. 1995. Once, on a Mountainside. Conclusion Author’s publication. Codification of different varieties of English is Ferrey, Ashok. 2005. Colpetty People. Sri Lanka: Perera Hussein. clearly an important first step in getting them Gunesekera, Romesh. 1992. Monkfish Moon. New accepted. It seems extraordinary that – as far Delhi: Penguin. as I am aware – there is still no established dic- —. 1994. Reef. New Delhi: Penguin. tionary of or Singaporean —. 1998. The Sandglass. New Delhi: Penguin. English or , or indeed of any Hussein, Ameena. 2003. Zillij. Colombo: Perera Hussein. other so-called ‘outer circle’ variety of English – Jeganathan, Pradeep. 2004. At the Water’s Edge. New with the notable exception of Indian English, York: South Focus Press. which is well documented and seems to be Kumarasinghe, Jagath. 2005. Kider Chetty Street. gaining recognition both within India and out- Colombo: Sooriya. side. I hope that my book might serve two pur- Medawattegedera, Lal. 2005. The Window Cleaner’s poses: first, to raise awareness of Sri Lankan Soul. Author’s publication. Muller, Carl. 1993. The Jam Fruit Tree. New Delhi: English both within Sri Lanka and outside; Penguin. and, second, to serve as a model for similar dic- —. 1994. Yakada Yaka. New Delhi: Penguin. tionaries of other South and South-East Asian —. 1995. Once Upon a Tender Time. New Delhi: varieties – a model which can no doubt be Penguin. improved upon, not least by benefiting from Ondaatje, Michael. 1988. Running in the Family. New Delhi: Penguin. newer developments such as corpus-based —. 2000. Anil’s Ghost. Sri Lanka: Picador. research. Roberts, Karen. 2001. July. London: Phoenix. Selvadurai, Shyam. 1994. Funny Boy. New Delhi: Notes Penguin. 1. Meyler, Michael (2007) A Dictionary of Sri —. 1998. Cinnamon Gardens. London: Penguin. Lankan English (with Dinali Fernando and —. 2005. Swimming in the Monsoon Sea. New Delhi: Penguin. Vivimarie VanderPoorten). Colombo: Michael Sivanandan, A. 1997. When Memories Dies. New Delhi: Meyler. The dictionary may be purchased directly Penguin. from Michael Meyler at . Wettasinghe, Sybil. 1996. Child in Me. Author’s Further details may also be found at: . Wijesinghe, Manuka. 2006. Monsoons and Potholes. 2. This article is based partly on presentations Colombo: Perera Hussein.

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