Consonants

Among the consonants, /r/ and /l/ are a particularly infamous pair for many Bantu speakers, both rendered as one and the same, often intermediate sound between /loli/ and /rori/ instead of /lori/, for instance. In Kenya, the pair is a clear subnational identifier, since even educated Gikuyu clearly tend towards /r/ and the neighboring Embu towards /l/. Occasionally the sets /tʃ/, /ʃ/ and /s/, and /ʤ/ , /Ʒ/ and /z/ are not distinguished clearly either. Other problematic consonants are /θ/ and /ð/, which often deviate in the direction of /d/ and /t/ or, sometimes, /z/ and /s/, rarely /v/ and /f/. Most of these deviations are registered by East Africans as subnational peculiarities. However, even though phoneme mergers are clearly noticeable, they do not endanger the consonant system as a whole. These examples show three general tendencies for consonants:

(a) The merger of /r/ and /l/ is wide-spread, but still stigmatized.

(b) Intrusive or deleted (as a hypercorrect tendency) nasals, especially /n/ in front of plosives, are common, since some languages like Gikuyu have homorganic nasal consonants.

(c) English fricatives are generally difficult but particular deviations are often restricted to certain ethnic groups.

At the subphonemic level, which is not important for differences in meaning but gives the English spoken a particular coloring, an interesting consonant is /r/. As in most English varieties, /r/ is usually only articulated in pre-vocalic positions (i.e. EAfE is non-rhotic) and its pronunciation varies considerably (whether it is rolled or flapped).