Pragmatic nativisation in spoken Sri Lankan English: a corpus-based study

• Applicant: Dr. Tobias Bernaisch
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 320408241

This project focuses on the empirical description of the pragmatic routines of spoken Sri Lankan English. For a long time, English in South Asia has been regarded as a homogeneous variant of English and has thus been subsumed under the monolithic term South Asian English, which has often been employed as an implicit synonym for Indian English. Consequently, only little academic attention - also due to a general lack of adequate empirical databases - has so far been paid to the regional diversification of English in the different South Asian nations outside India. This is also true of English in Sri Lanka, although this variety constitutes the only postcolonial English in South Asia which is not a direct descendant of Indian English. While first descriptions of written Sri Lankan English based on authentic language data have become available recently, spoken Sri Lankan English has so far largely remained empirically undocumented. This project aims at furthering our understanding of spoken Sri Lankan English, which is also of relevance for other postcolonial Englishes. In comparison to British English, the historical input variety of Sri Lankan English, and Indian English, the largest variety of English in South Asia, this project offers corpus-based descriptions of the pragmatic nativisation of spoken Sri Lankan English on the organisational and actional level under consideration of sociobiographic speaker information. In order to ground said analyses in a valid database, the first representative corpus of spoken Sri Lankan English comprising all contexts of use from informal chats between friends to formal political speeches is completed and published as a part of the Sri Lankan component of the International Corpus of English.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants