The Obstruent Inventory of Roper Kriol

Abstract

Roper Kriol is a major variety of the largest Indigenous Australian language, Kriol, yet its phonology remains under-described and it has never been examined instrumentally. Reports suggest high variability. We present a lexical survey with native Kriol speakers followed by two acoustic studies of the obstruent inventory with literate speakers, and finally an acoustic analysis of naturally occurring speech. We conclude that the obstruent inventory has inherited features from the substrate languages and English. It has contrastive stop voicing using Voice Onset Time differences in an English-like manner. It also has contrastive fricatives, but no voicing distinction in these phonemes. Like some of the substrate languages, stops also contrast in constriction duration to a much greater degree than English. There is no evidence that voicing is a variable phenomenon, and we suggest that the reported variability is due to language shift over several generations from a situation where it was primarily an L2 used by speakers of the substrate languages to the stabilized L1 form of Kriol described here. We argue that the creole continuum is unlikely to apply to true phonemic inventory differences, as opposed to surface phonetic forms and other aspects of grammar such as lexical choice.