Phonological systems of the Suriname creoles

We will deal with the vowel systems, consonant systems and tone systems in that order. Two of the three languages are lexical tone languages and we will give a very brief characterization of this aspect here.

All three languages are in a sense unusual—for varieties of English—in that they have official or semi-official writing-systems, which are very close to being phonemic. As these are already very familiar to linguists who work on these languages, we will make use of them here, with slight modifications where they deviate significantly from the IPA, such as in the use of y for /j/, or where they fall short. This we will take account of. We provide a description of the IPA values of the principal allophones.

One major difference from most other varieties of “English” is the large-scale occurrence of anaptyctic (epithetic) vowels. For instance foot appears as /fu’tu/ in all three languages. The first /u/ here we will refer to as the organic vowel, and the second as anaptyctic.