The Impact of the Socio-Political Tenacity on Language Usage in Sri Lankan English Journalistic Writings

Abstract

Recently, Sri Lanka underwent major political upheavals, structural and constitutional amendments that attracted the attention of the international community. Formulation of dilemmatic interim government of fifty-two days, the legal debates about alleged political misdemeanours, presidential and general elections were the main discourses of the Sri Lankan society during the last couple of years. Thus, the substantive researchers voyage on a genre analysis in order to analytically explore the intricacies of English journalistic writings as to how they have been impacted by the socio-political tenacity prevalent in the nation. These socio-political milieus were reflected in the English Language in myriad forums and most importantly were visible in the mainstream media in the country, particularly in English newspapers and led to the creation of timely vocabulary of a brief duration. As an instance, coinage of novel terms with a vernacular tinge can be depicted. This new vocabulary that was developed owing to the political and social pressures were replete with political implications, sarcasm and highly pragmatic meaning. Thus, contentious political debates and occurrences seem to have impacted on the structural and semantic English Language used in newspapers in the period concerned. Content analysis method was used to interpret the textual data and the ‘latent analysis’ method was exploited to analyse the pragmatic meaning of the language used. Thematic analysis was utilized to itemize the findings in the discussion heeding semantic denotations. It was evinced that local English journalistic writings do amply make use of SLE and intertwined use of vernacular language components to relay their socio-politically driven messages to the readership judiciously exploiting code-switching and code-mixing strategies. Thus, artistic journalistic writings have come into being having been profusely fed by socio-political transformations over the years. It has been primarily researched how formulation of ‘localized’ English terms, affixation of English terms with local flavour, and integration of vernacular expressions along with English wordings, have voiced out the intended messages from English journalistic writings vociferously.