Jamaican English

The consonants

There are 24 consonants in the phonemic inventory of JamE, inclusive of the semi-vowels /w/ and /j/. The inventory below, adopted from Wells (1973: 26), shows the consonant phonemes of JamE.

There are three consonant phonemes which exist in JamE but not in JamC. These are /θ/, /ð/ and . In JamE, by contrast with many varieties of JamC, /h/ is phonemic, appearing in this role in the same lexical items as it would in Standard British English.