Accounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois postulate around 21 phonemic consonants one which can be contrastive in the Western dialect. There are between 9 and 16 vowels. Some vowels are capable of nasalization and others can be lengthened.
| Labial | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal2 | Velar | Glottal | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||||||||
| Stop | p | b | t | d | tʃ | dʒ | c | ɟ | k | ɡ | ʔ | |
| Fricative | f | v | s | z | ʃ | ʒ | ç | ʝ | x | ɣ | h1 | ɦ |
| Approximant /Lateral |
ʋ | ɹ | j | w | ||||||||
| l | ʎ | ʟ | ||||||||||
- ^1 The status of /h/ as a phoneme is dialectal: in western varieties, it is a full phoneme and there are minimal pairs (/hiit/ 'hit' and /iit/ 'eat'); in central and eastern varieties, the presence of [h] in a word is in free variation with no consonant so that the words for 'hand' and 'and' (both underlyingly /an/) may be pronounced [han] or [an].
- ^2 The palatal stops [c], [ɟ][1] and [ɲ] are considered phonemic by some accounts and phonetic by others. For the latter interpretation, their appearance is included in the larger phenomenon of phonetic palatalization.
Examples of palatalization include:
- /kiuu/ → [ciuː] → [cuː] ('a quarter quart (of rum)')
- /ɡiaad/ → [ɟiaːd] → [ɟaːd] ('guard')
- /piaa + piaa/ → [pʲiãːpʲiãː] → [pʲãːpʲãː] ('weak')
Voiced stops are implosive whenever in the onset of prominent syllables (especially word-initially) so that /biit/ ('beat') is pronounced [ɓiːt] and /ɡuud/ ('good') as [ɠuːd].
Before a syllabic /l/, the contrast between alveolar and velar consonants has been historically neutralized with alveolar consonants becoming velar so that the word for 'bottle' is /bakl̩/ and the word for 'idle' is /aiɡl̩/.
Jamaican Patois exhibits two types of vowel harmony; peripheral vowel harmony, wherein only sequences of peripheral vowels (that is, /i/, /u/, and /a/) can occur within a syllable; and back harmony, wherein /i/ and /u/ cannot occur within a syllable together (that is, /uu/ and /ii/ are allowed but * /ui/ and * /iu/ are not). These two phenomena account for three long vowels and four diphthongs:
| Vowel | Example | Gloss |
|---|---|---|
| /ii/ | /biini/ | 'tiny' |
| /aa/ | /baaba/ | 'barber' |
| /uu/ | /buut/ | 'booth' |
| /ia/ | /biak/ | 'bake' |
| /ai/ | /baik/ | 'bike' |
| /ua/ | /buat/ | 'boat' |
| /au/ | /taun/ | 'town' |
References[]
- ↑ also transcribed as [kʲ] and [ɡʲ]