Communication Strategies among Trilingual Speakers: Switching and Borrowing among Sinhala, English & Japanese Languages

Abstract

Abstract-The present study examined communication strategies among trilingual speakers. The main focus was to seek evidence on language switching and language borrowing as communication strategies during conversations of Sinhala, English, and Japanese languages. A free-discussion task was conducted to gather data. Twenty-five native Sinhala speakers (14 male and 11 female) residing in Japan took part in the present task. The discussions were recorded and the results were analyzed via a simple contrast and a decision tree analysis using statistics. The analysis showed that switching and borrowing occurs arbitrarily among three languages during conversations with a high significance [x 2 (2)=46.985, p<. 0.01]. Thus, according to this study, language switching mostly occurs between Japanese & Sinhala languages, while language borrowing mostly occurs during Sinhala language conversations.