Jayaweera, Pamoda Malshani; (2024) Postcolonial Resistance or Dangling Carrots before the Unprivileged? A Critical Analysis of the Scholarly Discourse in Favour of Sri Lankan English. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis presents a comprehensive critical analysis of the broad scholarly discourse promoting Sri Lankan English. It is primarily a critical realist response to the absenting of broader structural conditions which influence linguistic ‘choices’ and experience in the scholarly discourse in question, as well as in World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca and other counter discourses towards standard English in applied linguistics more generally. In its critical realist exploration of the academic debates in favour of Sri Lankan English, the present thesis foregrounds causal mechanisms in the structural domain which have historically facilitated and continue to sustain the dominance of standard English effectively undermining the purely discursive scholarly attempts to counter its normative hegemony. It interprets the said structural conditions in terms of both material and non-material political-economic relations in a capitalist world-system by drawing on Marxist theories of capitalism and capitalist accumulation, world-systems theory and a Bourdieusian theorisation of the linguistic marketplace. The critical analysis undertaken in this thesis, which is both theoretical and grounded on empirical data, points to the disconnect between the discursive premises of the scholarly discourse under review and everyday lived experience. As argued, this dissonance is attributable to the conceptualisation of the normative predominance of standard English exclusively in light of discursive truths to the neglect of broader underlying material structural complexes that have dialectically generated and perpetuate its hegemony. It is illustrated how these wider structural forces underpinning the ascendancy of standard English also intersect with aspects such as socioeconomic class in Sri Lankan society, thus rendering the scholarly arguments in support of Sri Lankan English pragmatically unfeasible. As this thesis contends, a critically informed holistic appreciation of the structural ground realities of the dominance of standard English is imperative for conceiving possible strategies for dealing with these conditions

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