Phonological substitutions

As not all the languages of the Solomon Islands have all the consonantal phonemes of ‘standard’ Pijin as it is coming to be codified, they will characteristically replace some Pijin consonants with the closest equivalents available in their vernaculars. They contrast, where possible, with the more canonical ones in no more than a single distinctive feature. Below are some examples of frequent substitutions.

For example, if one’s mother tongue includes /p/ and not /f/, as in Tolo (an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Guadalcanal), the Pijin spoken by Tolo speakers will likely use [p] whenever [f] is standard. Children growing up in town and using Pijin as their main language, and sometimes as their mother tongue, will tend not to make this substitution, as their phoneme inventory will be likely to include both sounds.

Table 1 provides more examples of the possible substitutions most likely to take place motivated by the phonological system of the speaker’s vernacular.