Consonants

The consonants of both basilectal and mesolectal Hawai‘i Creole are basically the same as those of General American English. However, there are a few differences, and these are discussed below.The Hawai‘i Creole voiceless stops differ from those of General American English in some phonetic realizations. First, like English, voiceless stops are aspirated when they occur at the beginning of a syllable with primary stress, but unlike English they may be aspirated in other syllables as well, for example ['mɑk^het] ‘market’ and ['k^hɑt^hen] ‘carton’.

Second, voiceless stops that occur at the end of a word or at the end of a syllable followed by a consonant may be unreleased or glottalized, that is, pronounced with both oral articulation and glottal closure. In rapid speech [t] in this position may become a glottal stop, e.g. [nɑʔ] ‘not’.

Third, /t/ and /d/ are palatalized before /r/: [tʃri] ‘tree’, [ʤrɑɪ] ‘dry’. Finally, /t/ and /d/ are often used in place of what are /θ/ and /ð/ respectively in General American English.

Like General American English, /t/ and /d/ are flapped intervocalically in an unstressed syllable in normal speech, as in [miɾiŋ] ‘meeting’ and [bɑɾi] ‘body’. However, some flaps occur in Hawai‘i Creole where they are not found in General American English because of some of the differences in realizations described above, for example [wɪɾɑʊt] ‘without’ (because of /θ/ in place of /t/) and [poɾogi] ‘Portuguese’ because of /ɔ/ in place of /ɔr/.