Abstract:
In Sri Lanka, the trend of YouTube advertising has gained prominence as one
of the most productive ways of promoting productions, closely intertwined
with the utilization of morphological processes within the Sri Lankan English
(SLE) linguistic landscape. In the context of marketing goods and services,
producers use morphological processes as a strategy to attract customers while
popularizing advertisements. This study examines how frequently are
morphological processes utilized in SLE within the context of YouTube
advertising and aims to analyze the morphological processes used in Sri
Lankan English concerning the selected YouTube advertisements and to
identify the frequency of these morphological processes. Moreover, this paper
investigates the effective usage of these processes by YouTube advertisers. In
this study, data were collected using primary and secondary data collection
methods. After conducting a comparable observation, four types of varying
YouTube videos were selected for this investigation. Among the selected
advertisements, compounds, borrowings, reduplications, and tags and
expressions were widely used in SLE. Sinhala being the superstrate of Sri
Lanka, its influence over these processes is significant. On the other hand, the
co-existence of English and Sinhala languages influences the creation of new
words which ultimately results in code-mixing and code-switching. The
findings of the study reveal that compounding is the most productive and
frequently used morphological process in the selected YouTube
advertisements. The overall study depicts that the compounding and
borrowings have coined new and unique words in SLE and most of the words
are shaped by the influence of the Sinhala language. Thereby, YouTube
advertisers use morphological processes to familiarize products among the
community with the aid of language.
