Consonants th-stopping

The most salient contrast with prestigious English accents is th-stopping, which uses alveolar stops [t, d] to correspond to dental fricatives . This describes JamC and BrC; the stops themselves are sometimes fronted. This contrasts straightforwardly with LonVE, which instead substitutes [f, v], though only non-initially, for the voiced case. (Word-initial [ð] -stopping also occurs sometimes in LonVE; this environment is discounted below.) The [f] variant is more common; it is regularly assimilated by older Caribbean-born speakers, and surfaces unadapted, or misadapted (Sebba 1993: 53–56), in the BrC of the UK-born younger generation, in words such as both, mouth, north and Samantha. In a study of two London-born brothers whose parents were Jamaican-born, Knight (2001) found that David and Gary both avoided standard variants  entirely over several hours of speech (700 tokens). However, compared across three situations, David’s use of the JamC/BrC variants ranged from 18% to 55%, while Gary’s never surpassed 6%. Other variants were all LonVE forms, so both were highly vernacular speakers, but David was much more Creole-focussed, although even he used fewer such forms than the Dudley study found (Edwards [1986: 110] reports 41% to 100%). The pattern, confirmed with morphological data (plural-marking), suits their cultural styles: though close and involved in overlapping networks, the two contrast in their musical preferences, racial integration of football teams and school-friend networks, hair and clothing style, etc. In each case David’s associations are more overtly Caribbean or Black British than Gary’s. The family maintain strong contact with Jamaican culture, and neither boy is a ‘lame’ (Labov 1972): the language difference is down to individual agency, given joint exposure to varied resources.

As the likelihood of /v/ appearing intervocalically is bolstered by the [ð] -to-[v] rule, the old-fashioned occurrence of /b/-for-/v/ in JamC is not salient in BrC, though it happens for frequent forms such as neba ‘never, not’ or beks ‘vexed’.