Negombo Fishermen's Tamil: A Case of Indo-Aryan Contact-Induced Change in a Dravidian Dialect

2010/09/01 by Steven Bonta · 4 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Tamil #Hinduism #Buddhism #Sri lanka #Aryan race #South asia #Geography #History #Ancient history #Linguistics #Archaeology #Philosophy

paper · doi:10.1353/anl.2010.0021

published in Anthropological linguistics 52(3-4), 310-343

openalex publication_date 2010/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21

Abstract

Negombo Fishermen's Tamil, a dialect of Tamil from coastal Sri Lanka spoken by bilingual Catholic fishermen, exhibits many features of contact-induced change. Based on data collected in the Negombo area during 2000 and 2001, I conclude that Negombo Fishermen's Tamil has undergone significant amounts of borrowing and grammatical realignment under the influence of Colloquial Sinhala, an unusual instance of South Asian contact-induced change in the direction from Dravidian to Indo-Aryan. This has likely been conditioned by the Catholic religion of the Negombo Fishermen's Tamil-speaking community within a predominantly Buddhist and Hindu society.

Cited by

• Sri Lankan Tamils [wikipedia]

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