Tok Pisin phonology

Tok Pisin, like many pidgins and creoles, has a simpler phonology than the superstrate language. It has 17 consonants and 5 vowels. However, this varies with the local substrate languages and the level of education of the speaker. The following is the "core" phonemic inventory, common to virtually all varieties of Tok Pisin. More educated speakers, and/or those where the substrate language(s) have larger phoneme inventories, may have as many as 10 distinct vowels.

Nasal plus plosive offsets lose the plosive element in Tok Pisin e.g. English hand becomes Tok Pisin han. Furthermore, voiced plosives become voiceless at the ends of words, so that English pig is rendered as pik in Tok Pisin.

Consonants

	Labial		Coronal		Palatal		Velar		Glottal
Plosive	p	b	t	d	c	ɟ	k	ɡ	ʔ
Fricative	f	v	s	z	ç	ʝ	x	ɣ	h
Nasal		m		n		ɲ		ŋ
Lateral			l̥	l	ʎ̥	ʎ	ʟ̥	ʟ
Approximant	ʍ	w	ɹ̥	ɹ	j̊	j	ɰ̊	ɰ
Trill		ʙ		r
Flap		ⱱ		ɾ		ʎ̆		ʟ̆

• Where symbols appear in pairs the one to the left represents a voiceless consonant.
• Voiced plosives are pronounced by many speakers (especially of Melanesian backgrounds) as prenasalized plosives.
• /t/, /d/, and /l/ can be either dental or alveolar consonants, while /n/ is only alveolar.
• In most Tok Pisin dialects, the phoneme /r/ is pronounced as the alveolar tap or flap, [ɾ].

Vowels

Tok Pisin has 24 vowels, similar to the vowels of Spanish, Japanese, and many other five-vowel languages:

	Front		Central	Back
	unr.	rnd.		unr.	rnd.
Close	i	y	ɨ	ɯ	u
Near-close	ɪ	ʏ	ɵ		ʊ
Mid	e	ø	ə	ɤ	o
Open-mid	ɛ	œ	ɐ	ʌ	ɔ
Open	æ	ɶ	a	ɑ	ɒ

External links

• Tok Pisin