Developing Trends in Sri Lankan English (SLE) Vocabulary in the Domain of Journalistic Writing

Sri Lankan English (SLE) is recognized as an independent and unique variety of English. Since the introduction of English to Sri Lanka in 1796, its vocabulary has undergone a steady change. The current study is a trend analysis of the SLE vocabulary seen in journalistic writing. It is conducted through a content analysis and a comparative study. The data is extracted from selected newspaper articles of 1955-1965 and 2005-2015. A total of 44 newspaper pages were used for the study. The data is compared to identify the developing trends in the vocabulary used over a period of 60 years in the country. The data showed that the composition of the vocabulary of English in Sri Lanka has changed over the years. Some words have been dropped from usage and are considered archaic at present, while new vocabulary items have come into use. In the period under examination, there is an increase in the number of words that could be identified as ‘SLE vocabulary’. Many word formation processes are commonly used to create the new SLE terms that are added to the language.