Shattered Dream of Purism: Sociolinguistic Dynamics of the Emerging Hybrid Social Media Language in Sri Lanka.

The rapid digitization of communication in the last decade, especially in social networking spaces, has contributed to radical changes in the virtual language environment in Sri Lanka. It has not only reshaped the way individuals communicate, but has also fueled the emergence of new linguistic trends that reflect the dynamic nature of language in the contemporary virtual landscape. The present study seeks to explore the prospects of a pure language ideology in Sri Lanka with special reference to the use of Sinhala and English in the virtual space. The study used a corpus of memes extracted from social media and analyzed them from a sociolinguistic standpoint using Critical Discourse Analysis. The results show that social media have created a safe space for less competent language users to interact within their linguistic capacity. The adaptation of words and the invention of neologisms have occurred due to the unavailability of terms in users' L1 or L2, as well as to avoid taboos or prohibitions. Given the rapid evolution of communication technology, added to the dynamic changes that have already occurred within languages, aspirations to linguistic purism have become unrealistic optimism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]