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On the variability of vocalic inventory in Black South African English 47
2. The vocalic inventory of BSAE
Bertus Van Rooy (2008: 179) argues that BSAE is characterized by the
absence of the tense/lax contrast and that of central vowels, at least in the
mesolectal variety. His findings point to the fact that mesolectal speakers of
BSAE have five contrastive vowel phonemes, namely /i/, /ɛ/, /a/, /N/ and /u/.
Acrolectal speakers have some other vowels as well, which, as expected, bring
their variety closer to the native varieties of English, but there are some features
which are common along the lectal continuum. These and other features of the
BSAE vocalic system are discussed in what follows.
2.1. The monophthongs
According to Van Rooy (2008), drawing on Van Rooy and Van Huyssteen
(2000), the monophthongs of BSAE are the ones in Table 1; the mergers are
illustrated by their association with the same vowel in BSAE:
Table 1. Monophthongs mergers in BSAE (adapted from Van Rooy 2008: 179)
Lexical set item
KIT
FLEECE
FOOT
GOOSE
DRESS
TRAP
NURSE ɜ:
LOT
ɒ
CLOTH
ɒ
THOUGHT ɔ:
FORCE ɔ:
NORTH ɔ:
STRUT
RP target
vowel
ɪ
i
ʊ
u
ɛ
æ
ʌ
BATH ɑ:
PALM ɑ:
commA
lettER
ə
ə
BSAE
realization
i
u
ɛ
ɔ
ɑ‚
Van Rooy (2008: 180) writes that in terms of vowel quality monophthongs
are consistently transcribed as tense vowels but intermediate realizations between
tense and lax may occur. Also vowel length is found to not have phonemic
value but it may sometimes acquire a suprasegmental function, as vowels in
stressed words may be considerably longer than in unstressed words. He also
notes that central vowels are commonly realized as mid front vowels or as central
low vowels, in the sense that NURSE, for instance, will be realized as [ɛ],