A-Z of Sri Lankan English: O is for our people
Boys will not always be boys! Photo credit: National Geographic The possessive pronoun “our” is deceptively simple. But who are the “we” that it refers to? The expression our people is a…
Author: Michael Meyler
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: N is for na tree and nil manel
The national tree and the national flower were both in the news this year. In August the uprooting of the Indian willows lining Independence Avenue to be replaced by indigenous na trees…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: M is for monitor lizard
Sunimal Fernando, speaking from the audience at my presentation on Sri Lankan English at the recent conference on Language and Social Cohesion (Colombo, 17-19 October), confirmed my own conclusion, that while the…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: L is for link language
The A-Z of Sri Lankan English is back after a break. These short pieces focus on different aspects of the way English is used in Sri Lanka. Collectively they provide a cross-section…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: K is for kadé
I normally try to stay on the right side of the descriptive-prescriptive divide, but today I’ve got my prescriptive hat on. I deplore the habit of some writers, editors and publishers of…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: J is for jobless
In the UK and the US, being jobless is simply another word for being unemployed, not having a job – especially in newspaper headlines. Here in Sri Lanka it has an additional…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: I is for isn’t it?
A tag question (or question tag) is a short question tagged onto the end of a sentence: “It’s raining, isn’t it?” It is usually pronounced with a rising-falling intonation (high pitch on…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: H is for had
I recently listened to someone telling a story in the course of an informal conversation. The speaker was a Sri Lankan whose first language is English, and the story involved a group…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: G is for gode
Mahinda Rajapaksa makes no bones about his goday origins“ (Daily News 12/02/2010) The basic meaning of the Sinhala word gode (or goday) is rural, of the land, of the village, conjuring up…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: F is for for
Before reading on, try this short test. Which of the following sentences do you consider to be grammatically correct? 1. They have over a thousand visitors for a month. 2. They get…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: E is for Eelamist
The word Eelamist (as adjective or noun) refers to a person or organisation which supports the Tamil separatist cause in Sri Lanka. Like certain other -ist words (Zionist, Islamist, Loyalist), the word…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: D is for deffa
Eyebrows were raised when I included the word deffa on the mirisgala website under “new entries”. And it’s true that it is stretching the point to claim that it qualifies as standard…
A-Z of Sri Lankan English: C is for cousin brother
The terms cousin brother and cousin sister are not used in standard British English. Nowadays they are used in Sri Lanka to refer to any male cousin or female cousin respectively, but…
Letter to the Editor of Sunday Observer: Racism and editorial incompetence
This letter was published in the . Dear Sir, I am writing in response to Malinda Seneviratne’s article “Language standards: whose version of our reality should we inhabit?” (, 20 June 2010).…
B is for balls (and bowls)
In the article “The bowl-or-ball dilemma of rubbishing English standards” (6/6/2010), Dilshan Boange adds his voice to the growing clamour of protest at the idea of speaking English “our way”. He recounts…