Consonants

In general, Pijin consonants are rather similar to the corresponding consonants of English, except that English /r/ is typically replaced by an alveolar flap /ɾ/. A more thorough comparison of Pijin words and their English cognates.

There is a good deal of variation across individual speakers’ phoneme inventories, and as a result the decisions on inclusion and exclusion of phonemes in the above inventory are to some degree arbitrary. Not all speakers make use of the same set of distinctive features in their phoneme inventories, so that certain consonants will be conflated along different lines for different speakers. The voicing distinction is not always clear-cut, but both voiced and voiceless stops are included in the inventory as proposed above. For the alveolar fricative and the palatal affricate, however, we do not consider this distinction to be a phonemic one for most speakers. In reality, [č] alternates with [ǰ], which in turn alternate with [dy] and [d] in speakers who do not have palatal affricates. The palatal affricate may also be replaced with a fricative. The place of articulation of the fricative varies between alveolar [s] and palatal [ʃ].

[ǰ] and [ʃ] are not included in the inventory above, but are here considered phonetic variants of /č/ and /s/ respectively. Similarly, we will subsume [z] and [ʃ] under the voiceless /s/ as free variants, though clearly, some speakers apply a voicing distinction here. Slight feature differences in voicing, manner and place of articulation may therefore alter the individual speakers’ distribution of sounds in their phonemic and phonetic systems.

Other salient variants in the system proposed here resulting from such minimal differences occur with speakers who replace [p] with [f], or others who replace [f] with [p]. Also, voiced stops are often prenasalized, a feature that is also present in the vernaculars. Consonants /b/, /d/, /g/ are then realized as [mb], [nd], and [ŋg]. In some cases, written forms include the homorganic nasal, but in others, they do not, the spellings selectively reflecting the variation, e.g. sindaon or sidaon ‘sit down’ and babu or bambu ‘bamboo’.