In late June 2007, a group of HKU linguistics majors, including me, will embark on their linguistics field trip in Mauritius. As preparatory work, from March to May 2007, our group leader, Dr. Stephen Matthews, provided us with training in basic Mauritius Creole with the help of the book Mauritian Creole in seven easy lessons by Mark Frew. Each lesson in the book comprises a dialogue, a vocabulary list and points of grammar to learn.

In the training class, students read dialogues, phrases and sentences in the book and from time to time Dr. Matthews explained points of interest in such aspects as grammar, pronunciation and semantics. I recorded the students� reading for the purpose of this project.

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In the preparatory class, we were all using Mark Frew�s book. When instructed by Dr. Matthews to read dialogues or sentences, however, we did not read quite in the same way, even when another student had read once or after Dr. Matthews himself had demonstrated before. The point of interest here is that we captured visually the same orthographic forms but we pronounced differently. It is probable that we interpreted the orthography of Mauritian Creole in different ways which led to different pronunciations. This is particularly evident between French learners and those who have no knowledge of French (some students, including myself, are both linguistics and French majors).

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In a broad sense, this project aims to shed light on the above-mentioned problem of pronunciation and address it. Specifically, to achieve such objectives, the project contains the following three principal chapters:

�        Sound system of Mauritian Creole
� to present the sound system of Mauritian Creole based on previous works and in comparison with the sound systems of English and French

�        Decoding pronunciation from orthography
� to discuss the relationship between orthography and pronunciation in Mauritian Creole

�        Mispronunciation and causes
� to summarize different types of mispronunciation of students in the training class, and discuss possible causes; also to provide some advice so that linguistics students can learn Mauritian Creole more easily and accurately

Please access these chapters by clicking the links at the top or bottom of this page.

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