LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 20:3 March 2020
ISSN 1930-2940

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         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Grammatical Constraints in Tamil-English Code Mixing among the Urban Jaffna Tamils

Dr. K. Sanmuganathan, Ph.D., M.Phil., M.A., PGD in Edu.

Abstract

This paper analyses the grammatical constraints of Tamil-English code-mixing (CM) among the urban Jaffna Tamils. Sri Lanka is a multilingual country where there is a tendency of mixing two languages as a communicative strategy used by the speakers. It has been observed that mixing of indigenous languages - Sinhala and Tamil and English is a common speech behaviour which occurs in the discourse of educated bilinguals in Sri Lanka. In recent years, researchers have increasingly focused on the linguistic constraints on code-mixing. From a syntactic point of view, it is proposed that code-mixing is governed by a host code/guest code principle. This principle says that in a code-mixed discourse involving languages L1 and L2, where L1 is the host code and L2 is the guest code, the morphosyntactic rules of L2 must conform to the morphosyntactic rules of L1, the language of the discourse. In order to determine the rules that govern Tamil-English CM and possible grammatical constraints, the researcher involved the mixed method of analysis. The present study drew upon data collected from a recorded spontaneous conversation between bilinguals in a language contact situation in which the two languages are syntactically not similar from each other, namely, Tamil and English. The study addresses the question whether there are grammatical constraints on Tamil-English CM. The researcher has examined the grammatical aspects of code-mixing and found that code-mixing is a rule governed phenomenon, that is, there are constraints that govern where in a sentence a code-mixing can occur and where it cannot occur.

Keywords: Tamil-English Code Mixing, Urban Jaffna Tamils, educated bilinguals, grammatical constraints, rule governed, morphosyntactic rules

Introduction

Code mixing has been one of the popular studies in sociolinguistics since the mid-1970s, with numerous studies on bilingual Spanish-English communities in the United States and a few studies on other bilingual and multilingual communities around the world. In a bilingual speech community, there is a natural tendency among speakers to mix lexical items, phrases, clauses, and sentences during verbal interaction. This is an essential part of their communicative competence, the "ability to switch linguistically and appropriately according to the situational changes" (Verma 1975:35). The elements mixed belong to the "host" (L1) language which, for historical and socioeconomic reasons, has acquired more prestige than the "guest" language which receives them. "Code-mixing", "code-switching", and "borrowing" are some of the labels used in linguistic literature (e.g., Bloomfield 1933, Haugen 1956, Kachru 1978, Sridhar 1978, Poplack 1980, among others) to describe various kinds of mixtures resulting from language contact.

The present study is concerned with linguistic study of Tamil-English code-mixing among the Jaffna urban bilinguals. In order to analyze the grammatical constraints of Tamil-English code-mixing, social factors contributing to code-mixing must be considered because structural similarity does not alone result in code-mixing. Social factors are equally responsible for its occurrence. Sociolinguistically speaking, it is the language which is considered more basic i.e. more important in a given discourse situation in a given social setting. In a given social setting one language is considered to be more important than the other depending on the sociological patterns of the society. It has been argued that fluency in two languages for a person is never equal; one language always dominates another. Similarly, in a society, one language is considered more important in determining discourse situation and that language is considered as the base language for that society.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. K. Sanmuganathan, Ph.D., M.Phil., M.A., PGD in Edu.
Senior Lecturer in ELT
Department of English Language Teaching
University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. 40000
saneltc@yahoo.com
+94778759534
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