Abstract:

Accounts of the vowel inventory(ies) of Jamaican Creole are widely discrepant, and certain empirical questions, such as the role of vowel duration and use of tone, remain unanswered. Using both conversational and wordlist data, this research provides a detailed acoustic characterization of the monophthongs, diphthongs, and r-colored vowels utilized by 24 speakers in two regions of the theoretical Jamaican continuum, investigating phonetic variation across speakers of Creole and Jamaican English. Results suggest that the two groups of speakers do make different use of acoustic (F1/F2) space. It will further be argued in this paper that the data suggest that vowel duration functions to enhance slight spectral distinctions among upper-mid-back vowels /u, o/ for basilect-dominant speakers, while playing a less crucial role in distinguishing low-central /a,A/.