Vowel variation

In JamE, the item /bool/ ‘bowl’, but not /oold/ ‘old’ and /koold/ ‘cold’ have the variant /au/ pronunciation we have already seen for the cognates in JamC. The JamE variant form is /baul/. Irvine (2004) refers to a much revised school text in which ‘bowl’ is listed as having the same vowel as ‘cow’, ‘towel’, ‘out’, ‘couch’ and ‘round’. She suggests that this pronunciation has been or is in the process of being normalized by this particular text. As Irvine notes, speakers who pronounced the noun ‘bowl’ as /baul/ distinguish it from the verb ‘bowl’ by pronouncing the latter /bool/.

The forms [uo] and [iε] are not part of the idealized phonological system of JamE. They nevertheless occur as variants respectively of the /oo/ and /ee/ variables. The idealized JamE variants are [o:] and [e:] respectively. The diphthongal variants are clearly the result of diachronic and/or synchronic convergence with JamC. In this matching pair of back and front long vowel variables, the convergence with JamC is not exercised evenly. Irvine (2004) examines the formal JamE speech of a group of persons who, as a result of deliberate selection based on their speech to represent Jamaica in a promotional role, can be considered to represent models of idealized JamE speech. She finds that, for the back variable, there is 11% use of the [uo] variant, by comparison to 89% [o:]. However, the [iε] variant for the front variable appears 24% of the time as compared with 76% for [e:]. The JamC associated phone, [uo], is much less used and arguably a much more stigmatized JamC interference feature than is [iε]. By contrast, the frequency of the latter suggests that it is fairly well entrenched as a variant JamE vowel form.

Significantly, the acceptability of the phone [iε] in JamE is concentrated in the environment before /r/, e.g. /beer/ > [biεɹ] ~ [be:ɹ]  ‘beer, bear’, rather than elsewhere, e.g. /plee/ which would tend to have only [ple:] as its phonetic realization (A. Irvine, p.c.). The differential convergence at work here may be focussed in and confined to a specific phonological environment.