The purpose of this chapter is to present the sound system of Mauritian Creole in a more linguistic fashion, as Frew��s book (our Mauritian Creole textbook in the field trip preparatory class) does not provide a clear one. The pronunciation guide in the book (pp 9-10) is unsystematic, denoting sounds by crossing English and French spellings in an inconsistent way. This is comprehensible since probably the intended readers of his book are laymen rather than people who know linguistics. There is a need, I believe, of a linguistic description of the sound system of Mauritian Creole for linguistics students. To offer a deeper understanding of how phonemes in Mauritian Creole are like, some notes of the differences between the sound system of Mauritian Creole and those of English and French will follow.

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To present the charts of vowels and consonants of Mauritian Creole, I will base my work on Baker (1972: 40-44) with modifications justified later. Unlike Baker��s work, I will compile the charts of vowels and consonants in a more modern style, that of IPA for showing phoneme inventory of a language. A number of uncertainties about particular phonemes will be noted below, and hopefully some answers can be found out in the Mauritius field trip in late June.

Here is the articulatory-auditory vowel diagram of Mauritian Creole.

There are 5 oral vowels, and 3 nasal vowels.

For the nasal vowel /ɛ̃/, it is /æ̃/ in Baker (1972: 40) and /ẽ/ in Pudaruth (1972: 20), but Carpooran��s (2005) dictionary uses /ɛ̃/, which is also the symbol of the original French nasal vowel in IPA (1999). For the reason of authority, I have chosen /ɛ̃/ instead of those from older works.

Here is the table showing the consonant inventory of Mauritian Creole.

There are 18 consonants.

Bilabial

Labio-dental

Dental

Alveolar

Palatal

Velar

Uvular

Plosive

p b

t d

k g

Fricative

f v

s z

ʁ

Nasal

m

n

ɲ

ŋ

Lateral

l

Approximant

w

j

The phonetic symbol of the palatal nasal /ɲ/, which is used by Carpooran (2005) and I have selected, is problematic. This consonant symbol denotes a consonant with no oral release, but the symbols used in older works (Baker, 1972: 43; Pudaruth, 1972: 45) are /j̃/ or /ỹ/ which imply oral quality (since /j/ and /y/ themselves are oral sounds and the tilde ˜ above only indicates nasalization). The case can be either that the palatal nasal has undergone a change (with orality being gradually lost) or that there is imprecise use of phonetic symbols in the works mentioned. Since these authors have not provided explanation, the answer should be sought in my trip to Mauritius in late June.

I have also chosen /ʁ/ to mean the sound represented by ��r�� in orthography �V instead of /r/ from other works. Since in the present-day standard of IPA (1999), /r/ denotes an alveolar trill which is not the ��r�� in Mauritian Creole. Choosing /ʁ/ is to avoid confusion and indicate its nature (a velar fricative).

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Here are some points to note concerning the differences between the sound system of Mauritian Creole and those in English and French:

1) Loss of rounded front vowels

In Mauritian Creole, all front vowels are unrounded but back vowels are rounded; the same case applies to English. In French, however, front vowels exist in unrounded-rounded pairs but back vowels are rounded.

2) Loss of distinction of mid-low and mid-high vowels

Mid-low and mid-high vowels contrast with each other in French (/e/ vs /ɛ/; /o/ vs /ɔ/), but such distinction is neutralized in Mauritian Creole. The resultant vowels tend to be the mid-high versions (i.e. /e/ and /o/).

3) Use of nasal vowels

Mauritian Creole has retained the use of nasal vowels as in its lexifier language French. In both languages, nasal vowels and their non-nasal (i.e. oral) counterparts are phonemes, a change of which triggers a change in meaning. On the contrary, nasal vowels exist only as allophones in English �V phonetically they do exist, but not phonemically. Vowels, say /ɪ/ in /sɪn/ (��sin��), are nasalized in reality to anticipate the following nasal. Nasal vowels in Mauritian Creoles (and in French) require English speakers to make an effort in colouring a vowel with nasality quality in contrast to a vowel without such quality.

4) The glottal fricative /h/

As in French but unlike English, Mauritian Creole does not have /h/ in its consonant inventory.

5) Loss of certain more ��marked�� consonants from French in Mauritian Creole

/ʃ/ and /ʒ/ in French are reduced respectively to /s/ and /z/ in Mauritian Creole. As a result of the loss of rounded vowels, the French rounded approximant /ɥ/ (the reduced version of the French rounded front vowel /y/) is also lost.

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