Dr. C D Senaratne

Chamindi Dilkushi Senaratne (Wettewe) completed her PhD at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and was an NCAS grantee. Her research focuses on an extremely new area in Contact Linguistics in Sri Lanka. Her thesis titled ‘Sinhala-English code-mixing, a sociolinguistic study’ contributes to one of the most criticized, devalued and yet highly frequent linguistic phenomena in post-colonial urban Sri Lanka: Sinhala-English CM. Her findings prove that the contact between Sinhala and English has resulted in phonological extensions and reductions in the mixed types. The morphosyntactic features of Sinhala-English CM not only suggest that it is closely affiliated to the syntax of Sinhala but also that it has borrowed flexible features from English.

Her thesis, printed by the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT) can be viewed and purchased online at www.lotpublications.nl Her chief supervisor was Prof. dr. Pieter Muysken, a veteran in the field of Contact linguistics and bilingualism and Chair of Linguistics at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Her co-supervisor and promoter was Prof. dr. Roeland van Hout.