Guest Lecture by Professor Joybrato Mukherjee

Prof. Joybrato Mukherjee held a lecture titled “English in Post-Postcolonial Sri Lanka: Looking at the Nation’s Link Language from Outside” on the 29th of August 2014 at the Department of English. In addition to being the President of Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany and Vice President of DAAD, Professor Mukherjee is also Co-Principal Investigator of the Sri Lankan English component of the International Corpus of English.

The lecture problematized the use of the term “Postcolonial English” arguing that despite the wide use of the term, it fails to reflect that English in postcolonial nations are also influenced by factors which are not rooted in colonialism. Using corpora based evidence to substantiate his claims that Sri Lankan English was a good example of a post-postcolonial variety of English, Prof. Mukherjee concluded by highlighting the need to consider interconnections between regional varieties of English instead of limiting research to comparisons between the varieties of the metropolis and the postcolony.