Negombo Tamil dialect or Negombo Fishermen's Tamil is a

Sri Lanka Sri Lanka (, ; si, ශ්‍රී ලංකා, Śrī Laṅkā, translit-std=ISO (); ta, இலங்கை, Ilaṅkai, translit-std=ISO ()), formerly known as Ceylon and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an ...

Tamil language Tamil (; ' , ) is a Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia. Tamil is an official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the sovereign nations of Sri Lanka and Singapore, and the Indian territory of Pudu ...

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety (linguisti ...

used by the fishers of

Negombo Negombo (, ) is a major city in Sri Lanka, situated on the west coast and at the mouth of the Negombo Lagoon, in Western Province, from Colombo via Colombo - Katunayake Expressway. Negombo is one of the major commercial hubs in the country and ...

. This is just one of the many dialects used by the remnant population of formerly

Tamil Tamil may refer to: * Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils **Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia * Tamil language, nativ ...

speaking people of the western

Puttalam District Puttalam is a district situated near to the west coast of Sri Lanka. It has an area of . Along with the Kurunegala District, it formulates the North Western Province of Sri Lanka. The district capital is Puttalam, which borders the Kala Oya and ...

and

Gampaha District Gampaha District ( si, ගම්පහ දිස්ත්‍රික්කය ''gampaha distrikkaya'', ta, கம்பஹா மாவட்டம் ''Kampahā Māvaṭṭam'') is one of the 25 districts of Sri Lanka, the second level administ ...

. Those who still identify them as ethnic Tamils are known as

Negombo Tamils Negombo Tamils or Puttalam Tamils are the Tamil speaking ethnic Karavas who live in the western Gampaha and Puttalam districts of Sri Lanka. They are distinguished from other Tamils from the island nation by their unique dialects, one of which is ...

or as

Puttalam Tamils Negombo Tamils or Puttalam Tamils are the Tamil speaking ethnic Karavas who live in the western Gampaha and Puttalam districts of Sri Lanka. They are distinguished from other Tamils from the island nation by their unique dialects, one of which i ...

. Although most residents of these districts identify them as ethnic

Sinhalese Sinhala may refer to: * Something of or related to the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka * Sinhalese people * Sinhala language, one of the three official languages used in Sri Lanka * Sinhala script, a writing system for the Sinhala language ** Sinha ...

some are bilingual in both the languages.Contact-Induced Morphosyntactic Realignment in Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil By Bonta Stevens, South Asian Language Analysis Roundtable XXIII (October 12, 2003) The University of Texas at Austin South Negombo fishermen's Tamil: A case of contact-induced language change from Sri Lanka by Bonta Stevens , Cornell University

Morphology

The specific dialect known as Negombo Fisherman's Tamil (NFT) spoken by the

Karava Karava () is a Sinhalese speaking ethnic group of Sri Lanka, whose ancestors from ancient times migrated from the Coromandel coast, claiming lineage to the Kaurava royalty of the old Kingdom of Kuru in Northern India. The Tamil equivalent is Kar ...

Karaiyar Karaiyar is a Sri Lankan Tamil caste found mainly on the northern and eastern coastal areas of Sri Lanka, and globally among the Tamil diaspora. They are traditionally a seafaring community that is engaged in fishing, shipment and seaborne t ...

caste Caste is a form of social stratification characterised by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a style of life which often includes an occupation, ritual status in a hierarchy, and customary social interaction and exclusion based on cultura ...

fishers of Negombo. NFT has many distinctive traits, some of which may have arisen as a consequence of contact with Sinhala. It is also proposed that it may have undergone considerable morphosyntactic convergence with spoken or colloquial Sinhala (CS), as a consequence of contact with it. For example, NFT has mostly lost Tamil verb agreement morphology for person and number. Colloquial Sinhala (unlike Literary Sinhala) has a single verb form for all persons, singular and plural. Most Tamil dialects, by contrast, retain in both the spoken and the written languages a well-developed system of person and number verb agreement morphology. Thus in NFT we have, with

Jaffna Tamil dialect The Jaffna Tamil dialect is a Tamil dialect native to the Jaffna Peninsula and is the primary dialect used in Northern Sri Lanka. The Jaffna Tamil dialect has a very similar intonation to Malayalam. Both preserve certain archaic words and phon ...

(JT) which a major dialect of the

Sri Lankan Tamils Sri Lankan Tamils ( or ), also known as Ceylon Tamils or Eelam Tamils, are Tamils native to the South Asian island state of Sri Lanka. Today, they constitute a majority in the Northern Province, live in significant numbers in the Eastern Pro ...

ethnic group for comparison: *a. naan kolumbu-kki poo-ra (NFT) I Colombo go (I go to Colombo) *b. naan kolumbu-kku poo-r-een (JT) I Colombo going (I am going to Colombo) *c. mamə koləmbə-Tə yanəwa (CS) I Colombo go (I go to Colombo) NFT has also developed a number of other grammatical traits under the probable influence of Sinhala, including a postposed indefinite article, an indefinitizing postclitic –sari (apparently modeled on Sinhala –hari), and case assignments for defective verbs that follow the Sinhala, rather than Tamil, patterns of agreement.

Unique dialect

NFT probably originated in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, but has subsequently adopted, and is still adopting, Sri Lankan Tamil traits. The dialect is spoken by perhaps as many as 50,000 people, is thus a very distinctive dialect. With

Karnataka Karnataka (; ISO: , , also known as Karunāḍu) is a state in the southwestern region of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, with the passage of the States Reorganisation Act. Originally known as Mysore State , it was renamed ''Karnat ...

based Saraswat Konkani (Nadkarni 1975),

Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is a States and union territories of India, state in southern India. It is the List of states and union territories of India by area, tenth largest Indian state by area and the List of states and union territories of India ...

based Saurashtri (Smith 1978), Sri Lankan Creole Portuguese and the

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
''

Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people *Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece See also * * ...

, and

Kannada Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...

dialects of Kupwar ( Gumperz and Wilson 1971), NFT grammar is the outcome of pervasive structural realignment as a result of stable

bilingualism Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...

. Negombo Tamil is the fact that the Karavas immigrated to Sri Lanka much later than Tamils immigrated to Jaffna. This would suggest that the Negombo dialect continued to evolve in the Coromandel Coast before it arrived in Sri Lanka and began to get influenced by Sinhala. So, in some ways, the dialect is closer to those spoken in Tamil Nadu than is Jaffna Tamil.

References

External links

Focus on traditional fishing methods
by Bernard Sri Kantha (Sinhalese) {{Tamil language Endangered diaspora languages Sri Lankan Tamil society Tamil dialects

Morphology

Unique dialect

References

Further reading

External links