The main objective of this project is to throw light on the pronunciation of Mauritian Creole words by outlining how sounds and orthography are like and related in the contact language as well as discussing mispronunciation recorded in the field trip class. At this point, I sincerely hope that I have achieved this objective by means of concise but clear presentation of the sound system and grapheme-phoneme correspondence of Mauritian Creole, which is coupled with authentic examples of pronunciation errors. For linguistics students going to Mauritius this project may serve as supplementary guidelines on pronunciation, which I believe Frew��s book lacks.

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One of the missing links in this project is speech examples of native Mauritian Creole speakers. If there were such audio recordings, comparison of the pronunciation between native speakers and HKU linguistics students could be possible. Songs in Mauritian Creole are available, but the style of ��speech�� in songs is not like that in everyday conversation. Films and dramas in DVDs or VCDs are also available, but it is me who am insufficiently competent in Mauritian Creole and cannot quite understand the speech in them to obtain useful data.

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Perhaps my work here can be considered a failure in some way, since I seem to have created problems here and there throughout the course of the project which remain unsolved. Essentially, problems noted before are phonetic ones: problematic sounds such as /ɲ/, /ʁ/ as well as the tongue positions of /e/, /o/ and /ɛ̃/. So far this project has only dealt with the segmentals. Suprasegmentals like intonation should also have received attention. Answers to these problems and queries may be sought when I go to Mauritius in late June. The ��missing�� recordings of native Mauritian Creole speakers can also be made. Although I lack training in doing phonetics fieldwork, I hope I can at least bring back something useful and possibly update this website after the field trip. Another area which interests me is phonology, as recently I have been attracted by the Optimality Theory. It is probable that I may work more on phonology of Mauritian Creole for my field trip report.

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