Restructuring of the vowel system.

In the process of building a new system, Kamtok has drastically reduced the number of vowels it uses. Whereas English makes use of a dozen vowels, Kamtok vowels stand at six. This reduction in the number of vowels has been achieved partly through “mergers”.

A merger can occur within a language when, over the years, several sounds gradually become one. A number of similar or closely related English sounds are merged in Kamtok as one sound with which users are more familiar. Such a sound is usually one that is found in both English and most Cameroonian languages or only in the local languages. Some mergers are listed below:

A second aspect of vowel restructuring is a strong tendency to produce simple vowels in the place of certain English diphthongs, with the second element of the diphthong usually being dropped:

The pronoun ‘I’ /aɪ/ is usually produced in Kamtok as /a/.

Other centring diphthongs of English are restructured to produce new sound combinations, which accord with Kamtok phonology:

English triphthongs are restructured through glide formation. This process involves the transformation of the central element of the triphthong: /ɪ/ becomes /j/ and /ʊ/ becomes /w/. This splits the vowel sequence into two syllables as in the following examples: