The Sociolinguistics of Quotatives in Sri Lankan English: Corpus-Based Insights

This paper examines the quotative system of Sri Lankan English. Quotatives are identified in face-to-face conversations in the Sri Lankan component of the International Corpus of English. The use of kiyala indicating and following quoted material has been transferred from Sinhala, one of the indigenous languages of the country, into Sri Lankan English. Together with the occurrence of complementising that, the localisation of the Sri Lankan English quotative system is evident. Special emphasis is given to the choice between BE like and SAY, the by far most frequent quotative forms in the informal spoken data analysed. They are annotated with established structural (e.g., content of the quote or tense) and sociobiographic variables (e.g., age and gender of the speaker) apparent from earlier quotative research, but also with new ones (e.g., quote length or speakers’ stays abroad or media exposure to particular varieties of English). Via a generalised linear mixed-effects model tree implementing the latest methodological suggestions for classification trees, it is found that BE like is favoured over SAY in Sri Lankan English with younger speakers—particularly when the conversation took place after 2015 and events are narrated using the historical present.