Negombo Tamil Dialect - Morphology

Morphology

The specific dialect known as Negombo Fisherman’s Tamil (NFT) spoken by the Karava caste 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 (JT) which a major dialect of the Sri Lankan Tamils 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.