Typology of creole phonology

Phoneme inventories and syllable templates

Thomas B. Klein | Georgia Southern University

This paper reports on the analysis of a typological database of creole phoneme inventories and surface syllables. The sample encompasses a balanced set of creole languages lexified by Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The results of the analysis demonstrate that most creole languages exhibit between twenty and thirty-seven contrastive segments, between five and seven phonemic vowel qualities, and between two and three stop series. No creoles show only CV, and many display CCVC surface syllables. These features are quite unremarkable in comparison with non-creole languages around the world, but they represent significant evidence against claims that the structure of creole languages is especially simple. Instead, creole languages cluster in the typological middle.

Keywords: typology, creole phonology, simplicity, typicality, complexity, uniformity, syllable types, phoneme inventories

Published online: 17 February 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.26.1.06kle

Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

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2019. On the relevance of voice quality in contact varieties. Language Ecology 3:1 ► pp. 3 ff.

Russell, Eric

2015. Competences in contact. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 30:1 ► pp. 116 ff.

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