Abstract:
Within the postcolonial context of Sri Lanka, English plays a vital role in
moulding the nation’s linguistic discourse. Sri Lankan English has been
established as a variety, and its developmental trajectory can be grounded in
the theoretical framework of Postcolonial Englishes. Further, with globalisation
and the dissemination of internet, the hegemonic grip held by English in
Sri Lanka is further strengthened as English has seemingly become the
dominant lingua franca, especially in social media. In the Sri Lankan context,
the sociolinguistic landscape of social media platforms is characterized by
the dynamic interplay between English and local languages, namely Sinhala,
fostering a space for linguistic creativity. Out of the myriad varieties of
creative linguistic constructions- such as lyrics and taglines in advertisements-
bilingual puns in the form of memes are the foci of this study. A pun is a
creative take on language where wordplay is used to evoke humour, and to
grasp the meaning of a pun, the context is of vital importance. Bilingual puns
are a result of blending, code-mixing and code-shifting, and these linguistic
processes are vital features of nativisation of English, in a Postcolonial Englishes
perspective. Therefore, this study aims to present a sociolinguistic analysis of
the features of Sinhala and English bilingual puns present on Facebook and
Instagram. Memes with bilingual puns were selected from chosen Facebook
and Instagram pages. By utilising Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse
Analysis, these memes were analysed to identify their linguistic features and
their context and culture-specific nature. Additionally, it was deduced that
blending was the most prevalent linguistic feature in the creation of bilingual
puns. Therefore, this study contributes to the study of morpho-syntactic
features of Sri Lankan English and Sinhala-English bilingual puns.
