The Language Politics of Aragalaya: A Multilingual Protest Movement in Postwar Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT: In the midst of the worst economic crisis since independence, in April 2022 Sri Lankan youth started a protest movement called Aragalaya (struggle), which called for the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The country was nearly out of foreign currency and had defaulted on massive local and foreign loans as a result of poor political decisions, reckless spending, and President Rajapaksa's criminal financial mismanagement. A dynamic and ideologically diverse movement devoted to fighting corruption and bringing about system change through nonviolent protest, Aragalaya was physically based at Gota Go Gama (GGG), a protest village in an oceanside park at the heart of Colombo from April to July 2022. While initially most of the participants were from the Sinhala majority community, over time, Tamil-speaking ethnic minorities also joined. This article takes a language-focused approach to the study of global protest movements by examining participants' efforts to promote unity and inclusivity by making Aragalaya (the movement) and GGG (the protest site) trilingual in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. I incorporate participant observation and interviews conducted in 2022 and 2023. The first part of the article examines how participants transformed GGG into a trilingual performative space through multimodal media including signboards, slogans, speeches, hashtags, and social media posts. I then analyze Sinhala participants' views on the trilingual effort and discuss how Tamils and Muslims understood that effort in relation to other interactional practices at GGG with the Sinhala majority. I argue that, while Aragalaya participants creatively played with language, script, and images to counter Sinhala-only ideology and practices, interactional dynamics nevertheless reproduced linguistic inequalities.