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Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) is the only example of a typologically South Asian language whose lexical inventory is mostly Malay (Paauw 2004). As such, it can show us with particular clarity which properties change and which ones are retained in cases of areal convergence. We find that, despite extensive convergence on the grammars of Tamil and Sinhala, grammatical phenomena remain which suggest continuity from the lexical source language varieties, spoken in Indonesia. This is particularly clear in the verbal domain (Slomanson 2005), however the nominal domain is also conservative in certain respects. For example, the optional number marking of SLM nouns, though associated with a specific variety of vehicular Malay in Indonesia, originates in the languages of Java spoken natively by many ancestors of today’s SLM speakers. The number-marking found in modern SLM is not a recent development.

The respective contributions of Malay and the major Sri Lankan languages can be seen in the etymological origins of SLM postpositions, which are largely derived from prepositions found in contact varieties of Malay and the languages of Java. We will discuss their grammaticalization as case markers and as markers of nominalized clauses. Complex postpositional phrases involving a spatial element and an associated case-marking postposition are indeed modeled on analogous constructions in other Sri Lankan languages. For example, itu nang belakang (etymologically “behind that”) has become a temporal PP in SLM, meaning “after that”. The determiner itu is marked as oblique by nang, etymologically an adposition. The analogous element –ukku in Sri Lanka Muslim Tamil (SLMT) is a dative suffix which is not an adposition. The analogous construction in SLMT is avukku poro: (standard Tamil avukku appuram), which similarly can mean either “behind that” or “after that”. Only the spatial meaning is available in antecedent Malay varieties in Indonesia.

The forms nyang, nang, nya, and na (and possibly yang, though homophonous with the standard Malay relativizer) may be viewed as historical allomorphs which have become functionally differentiated in order to encode case and other functional contrasts found in Tamil and Sinhala. Nyang and nang are directional adpositional allomorphs in Javanese, a language which was spoken by many seventeenth and eighteenth Indonesian migrants in Sri Lanka, along with Jakarta Malay. We will discuss the respective functions of these elements and their diachronic relationship to each other in SLM.

We will base our analysis primarily on data from SLM varieties spoken in Colombo and Kirinda.

REFERENCES

Paauw, S.H. (2004) A Historical Analysis of the Lexical Sources of Sri Lanka Malay. Unpublished York University MA
thesis.

Slomanson, P. (2005) “Sri Lankan Malay Syntax: Lankan or Malay?” In Deumert, A. & Durrleman, S. Title TBA.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishers.