Nasal vowels

As is normal in many language varieties, vowels in JamC are nasalized in the environment of nasal consonants. The examples below demonstrate this.

There is a phonological rule which applies to monosyllabic grammatical morphemes ending in a nasal consonant. This vowel may be deleted leaving only the nasalization on the vowel to signal its underlying presence. Note that, in the case of /wan/, which has both a lexical meaning ‘one’, and that of the indefinite article, it is only the latter, as shown in (5) a. below, which allows for the optional deletion of the final nasal.

Distinct from nasal allophones of the vowel phonemes, there is a nasal vowel phoneme. This vowel is /ãã​/ with the phonetic realization of [ã:]. It appears in a small number of quite regularly used words. In the examples below, we see a case of a contrast in identical environments, involving the first pair, and, in the second pair, a contrast in analogous environments. These contrasts establish the phonemic status of /ãã​/ in relation the phonetically closest vowel phoneme, /aa/, independent of suprasegmental features, which remain constant in each member of the pairs below.

JamC syllables with /ãã​/ as their nucleus tend to have an equivalent syllable in JamE cognates consisting of the vowel /aa/ or /çç/ and a post-vocalic /nt/ cluster. Even though /nt/ exists in the vast majority of JamC items with English /nt/ cognates, e.g. /plaant/ ‘plant’, /aant/ ‘haunt’, etc., a small group of items such as /wãã​/ ‘want’ and /kjãã​/ ‘can’t’ appear in JamC minus the word final /nt/ cluster of the English cognate. It is this fact which creates the lexical contrast.