The influence of English usage for creation of new Sinhalese words

Abstract

There are ten major language families that have strong interdependence relationship of each other. Sinhala is our mother tongue and the second language is English. The influence of classical languages such as Sanskrit, Pali on Sinhala plays vital roles to generate new vocabulary. There are three main streams of word categorization due to influence of other languages such as Sanskrit, Pali and Tamil on Sinhala as Tatsama, Tadbhava and niṣpanna. Many researches have been conducted with respect to those languages except English. Numerous words and usages that have been extracted from English can be seen in our mother tongue. But those new trends (propensities) are not studied on the basis of ancient philological methods mentioned in Sanskrit grammar compilations. Generally people who are not fluent in English pronounce words in identical way. But the pronunciation of those words is critically reviled. For instance, the word of Aunt is pronounced as "enty" or "ānty ". These kinds of words are considered as wrong but the pronunciation of those words is accurate because these are tadbhava words and cannot be accepted as original English words. In this paper attempt will be taken to categorize and introduce this kind of new words that should be added to Sinhalese vocabulary.