SRI LANKA

Sri Lanka
Language Shift: from Sri Lanka Portuguese to Sinhala
Thursday 9th January 2020 @ 3 pm

Venue: M B Ariyapala Auditorium
Department of Sinhala Faculty of Arts, University of Colombo

In this lecture, Dr Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, FRAS, Senior Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, will discuss the language situation of the Afro-Sri Lankan community in the village of Sirambiyadiya, near Puttalam, northwestern province. Their songs called manhas,
are receptacles of Sri Lanka Portuguese (called Indo-Portuguese of Ceylon or Ceylon Portuguese in the nineteenth century), once the mother-tongue of the community. Immersed in a multilingual milieu, the community has now shifted to Sinhala.
A Question & Answer session/Discussion will
follow the lecture.
Dr de Silva Jayasuriya is an UN expert on Afrodescendants in Asia and served as rapporteur of the UNESCO International Scientific Committee of the Slave Route Project (Paris). She is the author of eight books and Director/Producer of four ethnographic films.