Rohini Widyalankara

Tamil / Other Variety of Sri Lankan English Speech Communities: Incorporating Tamil English to the Taxonomy of Sri Lankan English Pronunciation Rohini Widyalankara

This book examines dialectal variation in Sri Lankan English (SLE) pronunciation through a taxonomic vantage where the architecture is scrutinized through deviations in lexical pronunciation. The status of Tamil English is examined and empirical validation is procured for its recognition as a separate entity in the taxonomy of SLE pronunciation. This validation is constructed through the analysis of the % rate of occurrence of 10 pronunciation characteristics unique in Tamil/Other Variety of Sri Lankan English (T/OVSLE) bilinguals. These features deviate from Standard Sri Lankan English (SSLE) as well as the pronunciation of Sinhala/Other Variety of Sri Lankan English (S/OVSLE) bilinguals. 486 participants selected through stratified random sampling measures provide data across an instrument of 50 word tokens. The word tokens represent 7 common areas of pronunciation and 10 unique to T/OVSLE bilinguals and were randomly shortlisted from literature on SLE and learner English pronunciation of bilinguals with Tamil as their first language. Analyzed data evidences a zero occurrence of the 10 features unique to T/OVSLE bilinguals in lexical elicitations of the S/OVSLE population.