The vowel inventory of Roper Kriol

Despite being the largest Indigenous Australian language, Kriol—an English-lexified creole spoken across the northern part of Australia—is still largely unexamined from an instrumental or phonological point of view. This hampers efforts to predict crosslinguistic difficulties experienced by Kriol speakers in English-language settings and crucially in predicting the difficulties that Kriol-speaking children face in learning Standard Australian English. We report here on the vowel inventory of Kriol, which has previously been claimed to have between five and seven monophthongs and three or four diphthongs ([19],[20]). We show that its vowel system is in fact a triangular five-vowel system, with a duration contrast, and a number of diphthongs. This system thus reflects, in certain respects, typical inventories of the Indigenous substrate languages, except that, by radically increasing the number of available phonemes, Kriol has managed to keep the majority of vowel contrasts of English intact.