Aspects phonologiques du créole de Bombita

Abstract

The Creole of Bombita (CB) is a ‘mixed talk’ that borrows some features from Haitian Creole (HC) and from Dominican Spanish (DS). It is formed from HC but it has some specificities that it doesn’t share with it. It comprises also some features of DS but it functions in a different way in CB. This is why it can be considered as a different way of speaking from HC and DS. In this article, we are interested in studying some phonological specificities of the CB where we came to the fact that its phonological system is almost similar to the one of HC and very close to DS with some differences. We analyze some phenomena such as some ˝diaphonic˝ variants which appears in the substitution of [b] to /v/, [l] to /r/, [w] to /r/. That means the phonemes /v/ and /r/ are realized in some specific contexts which we will put in an obvious place for [b] and for [l] or [w]; the velarization after a nasal vowel in coda; the syncope of the postvocalic consonant [s]. We conclude that the CB is the result of a continuous dialectalization of HC in contact with DS with regard to the new linguistic environment that HC is in familiar terms with since 1930 (date of arrival of the first Haitian immigrants in Bombita).