Catch me if you can: Pathways of Dravidian influence in Sri Lanka Malay

Sebastian Nordhoff

doi:10.1515/jsall-2014-0005

Article

Catch me if you can: Pathways of Dravidian influence in Sri Lanka Malay

Sebastian Nordhoff
Sebastian Nordhoff has worked on the languages of Sri Lanka, their description and analysis, and the influences they exert on each other. He is furthermore interested in Digital Humanities and is the creator of the bibliographical repository Glottolog and the grammar writing platform GALOES. He is currently working on the digitization of the Mouton Grammar Library and the interconnection of linguistic resources in the Linguistic Linked Data Cloud.

Published/Copyright: March 15, 2014

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From the journal Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics Volume 1 Issue 1

Abstract

Discussions of the history of Sri Lanka Malay have so far tried to evaluate the development of Sri Lanka Malay with regard to the relative influence from the adstrates Sinhala and Tamil. This paper shows that such an approach is too coarse-grained and that the dialectal situation of especially Tamil has to be taken into account. After an overview of the dialectal situation we find on the island, three directions of language change are established: (1) Sinhala moves towards a general Tamil typology; (2) South Western Muslim Tamil moves towards Sinhala; and (3) Sri Lanka Malay moves towards South Western Muslim Tamil and/or Sinhala. A discussion of the problematic nature of the assumptions of “fixed targets” in language contact studies emanating from point (3) closes the paper.

Keywords: Sri Lanka; Sri Lanka Malay; Sinhala; Tamil; dialectology; language contact

About the author

Sebastian Nordhoff

Sebastian Nordhoff has worked on the languages of Sri Lanka, their description and analysis, and the influences they exert on each other. He is furthermore interested in Digital Humanities and is the creator of the bibliographical repository Glottolog and the grammar writing platform GALOES. He is currently working on the digitization of the Mouton Grammar Library and the interconnection of linguistic resources in the Linguistic Linked Data Cloud.

Published Online: 2014-3-15

Published in Print: 2014-3-1

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jsall-2014-0005

Keywords for this article

Sri Lanka; Sri Lanka Malay; Sinhala; Tamil; dialectology; language contact