Urbanization

Among most rural speakers and many older urban speakers, the phonetic interferences from the vernaculars are obvious. In the urban Pijin of the younger generation, particularly of the children, these variations tend to be neutralized. This phenomenon is associated with the children’s loss of contact with vernaculars. It seems obvious from research that the less the children are exposed to vernaculars and their phonology, the less their Pijin retains the phonological features of these languages. The phonetic system is regularized, often moving it away from that of the vernacular, and for some speakers, clearly in the direction of English. The epenthetic vowels are disappearing, along with some etymological ones; the result is that consonant clusters are more common in urban Pijin than they are in rural Pijin (although here, too, many ensuing clusters are rapidly eliminated by further reduction). Paragogic and other final vowels are also disappearing. This leads to the overall effects of regularization and, inevitably, shortening. For example:

Notice that the words most prone to such reduction are pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions and other grammatical markers. Function words are, perhaps in part due to their high frequency and their unstressed position in the sentence, most prone to be affected by the tendency to shorten and reduce phonological material.