Consonant stability in Portuguese-based creoles

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Abstract Research on language stability typically departs from a sample of mother-daughter languages (e.g., Greenhill et al. 2017, Honeybone 2019, Moran et al. 2021). Instead, this study aims at measuring consonant stability (presence or absence of change) in Portuguese-based creoles. Our approach enables us to: (i) build a stability scale of the adaptation of shifted phonological systems, and (ii) measure distances between creoles with regard to their lexifier. Our hypothesis is that less stable segments are typologically rare and that they were unstable in Portuguese from the 16th century until today. Our main findings are: (i) consonant stability is strongly correlated to typological frequency, (ii) the similarity between the consonant systems of the substrates and the lexifier does not affect the stability scores, and (iii) the sociohistorical characteristics of each settlement, namely the duration and the conditions of contact, play a role on phonological stability in the creoles under observation.