Negombo Tamil dialect
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- For other usage of this term see the disambiguation page Negombo Tamil
Negombo Tamil dialect or Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil is a Tamil language dialect used by the fishermen of Negombo, Sri Lanka. They are from several castes and are bilingual Roman Catholic fishermen.
While these people speak Sinhala with native fluency, and often identify themselves as Sinhalese, most of them also use a peculiar dialect of Tamil in the home and at work. The Negombo Tamil dialect, hereafter Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil (NFT), appears to have undergone considerable morphosyntactic convergence with Sinhala, as a consequence of contact with Colloquial Sinhala (CS).
