O onset no angolar moderno

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Angolar is one of the autochthonous languages of the Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. This study aims to describe the syllable onset in Angolar, based on Syllable Theory (Selkirk, 1982). As for the corpus, we analyzed 1524 items collected in 2014 and in 2018 in São Tomé and Príncipe, based on recordings with bilinguals (speakers of Angolar as their mother tongue and Portuguese as their second language). Using the Dekereke software (Casali, 2022), we detected the following structures: V, CV, CGV, CCV, CVC, VC and VG. In syllable onset, one or two consonants are legal. This can generate a simple onset (C) or a complex C1C2 sequence with the following configurations: 1) C1 may be an obstruent (b, p, t, d, k, g, f, v) followed by C2 (l, ɾ); 2) C1 may be a consonant (b, p, t, d, k, g, f, v, s) followed by G (w, j). Word-initial nasals followed by obstruents were considered pre-nasalized stops, consisting of a single contour segment in onset position. Furthermore, we highlight that syllable onsets in Angolar follow the Sonority Sequence Principle, as its elements increase in sonority up to the syllable nucleus: C1C2 (0 > 2); and C1G (0 >3).