Negombo Tamil dialect or Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil is a Sri Lankan Tamil language dialect used by the fishers of Negombo, Sri Lanka. This is just one of the many dialects used by the remnant population of formerly Tamil speaking people of the western Puttalam District and Gampaha District of Sri Lanka. Those who still identify them as ethnic Tamils a known as Negombo Tamils or as Puttalam Tamils but most residents of these districts identify them...
more
Negombo Tamil dialect or Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil is a Sri Lankan Tamil language dialect used by the fishers of Negombo, Sri Lanka. This is just one of the many dialects used by the remnant population of formerly Tamil speaking people of the western Puttalam District and Gampaha District of Sri Lanka. Those who still identify them as ethnic Tamils a known as Negombo Tamils or as Puttalam Tamils but most residents of these districts identify them as ethnic Sinhalese and are some are bilingual in both the languages.
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....
less
