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How are New Words Created in Sri Lankan English?
Coining new words in English Language
Language reflects how society perceives the world. Sri Lankan English (hereafter SLE) which is identified as a distinct variety of English has a rich vocabulary from English coming into contact with the other languages in Sri Lanka. SLE vocabulary has been enriched by the continuous addition of new words formed through a number of morphological processes. According to Senaratne (2009, p.52), “Sinhala, heavily influences the variety of English spoken in Sri Lanka and ‘Sri Lankan English’ or ‘Lankan English’[1] is used by Sri Lankans who speak English as their first language and Sri Lankans who are bilingual”. This study examines the productive and least productive morphological processes used in SLE newspapers named “ Sunday Observer (hereafter SO): and “Daily Mirror” (hereafter DM) and how it expands the Sri Lankan English vocabulary is being discussed. Furthermore, it investigates the use of different morphological processes of SLE used in two English newspapers and the findings are presented qualitatively.
The productivity of word formation process is not only a theoretical discussion, but it’s a theoretical pre-requisite to any grammatical description that presumes that fluent speakers have a capacity to generate new words. It focuses on certain morphological processes namely, borrowing, compounding, abbreviation, affixation, blending and reduplication, which, according to Halliday ( 2009) are the most significant ones operational in developing the vocabulary of a national variety of a language. Among the many word formation processes of SLE vocabulary, such as affixation, initialisms, compounding, clipping and semantic shift, borrowings have been the focus of extensive documentation ( Passe 1995, Gunesekera 2005, Meyler 2007, Sivapala et al 2010, Fernando 2012). Although, some linguists assert that a morphological process is either productive or not productive, it depends on how we account for constraints on productivity, which can be phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic.
The potential of a word formation pattern to be exploited in the creation of new words is seen to be one of the defining characteristics of morphological productivity. Baugh (1935, 2nd edition 1951: 34) states in relation to the English…
