From Jamaican Creole to Jamaican English: The consonantal system

JamC has 21 consonants as compared with 24 for JamE. The difference in the consonant inventory of the two language varieties involves three JamE fricatives, /θ/, /ð/ and /Ʒ/ , which do not exist in JamC. Thus, the one-to-one relationship between JamC and JamE consonants breaks down on three occasions. These are presented below.

These produce the following equivalences.

In our discussion of variation, we already looked at the /θ/ ~ /t/ and /ð/ ~ /d/ variables. In relation to the /ʤ/ ~ /Ʒ/ variation, Irvine, both with reference to her work as well as other material, concludes that /Ʒomeko/ ‘Jamaica’ and /Ʒεnorol/  ‘general’, to be increasingly a feature of some formal speech. This might be perceived to be an overgeneralization, i.e. JamC /ʤ/ → JamE /Ʒ/ conversion even in words like ‘Jamaica’ and ‘general’ which, in JamC and most varieties of English, have [ʤ]. The form [Ʒ] is often selected when the spelling of the word precludes a /dj/ interpretation possible in [so:ldjo] ‘soldier’, for example.