Background

Language family: French Creole

This creole language is spoken in Saint Lucia, an island within the Caribbean.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t d			k ɡ
Affricates			tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ			h
Nasals	m	n			ŋ
Approximants		l ɹ		j	w
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced. The alveolar approximants are both voiced, but the one on the left is lateral.

Vowels

There is some debate as to how many vowels are included in the vowel inventory. Klein (2006) as well as Mondesir and Carrington (1992) argue for an eight-vowel inventory (p. 9; p. 3); however, Crosbie and Frank (2001) as well as D. B. Frank (2007) argue for a seven-vowel inventory (p. xi; p. 3). The debate centers around the question of whether /a/ and /ɑ/ are contrastive. Given the fact that Lefebvre (2011) indicates that /ɑ/ has only been marginally attested and seldom appears in modern day St. Lucian Creole, I have opted for the seven-vowel distribution (pp. 109-110).
Three nasal vowels are also classified as phonemes, indicated by a following ⟨n⟩ (Crosbie and Frank 2001, xvii).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
High-Mid	e ẽ		o õ
Low-Mid	ɛ		ɔ
Low		a ã
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are oral and those on the right are nasal.

Alphabet

Mondesir and Carrington (1992) has /ɛ/ represented by ⟨e⟩ (p. 4), whereas most other sources use ⟨è⟩ as the convention (Crosbie and Frank 2001, xi; D. B. Frank 2007, 4–11). Crubadan seems to use ⟨è⟩; however I will account for both forms due to /e/ being distinguishable.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
b	/b/
d	/d/
é	/e/
è; e	/ɛ/
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/
h	/h/
i	/i/
j	/ʒ/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
ò	/ɔ/
p	/p/
r	/ɹ/	only appears in English loanwords
s	/s/
t	/t/
v	/v/
w	/w/
y	/j/
z	/z/
Digraph
ch	/ʃ/
dj	/dʒ/
ng	/ŋ/
ou	/u/
tj	/tʃ/
an	/ã/
en	/ẽ/
on	/õ/

References

Crosbie, Paul, and David Frank, eds. 2001. Kweýol̀ Dictionary. 1st ed. Castries, Saint Lucia: Ministry of Education, Government of Saint Lucia.

Frank, David B. 2007. “Sources of St. Lucian Creole Vocabulary.” In. University of Amsterdam.

Klein, Thomas Β. 2006. “Creole Phonology Typology: Phoneme Inventory Size, Vowel Quality Distinctions and Stop Consonant Series.” In The Structure of Creole Words, edited by Parth Bhatt and Ingo Plag. Berlin, Boston: DE GRUYTER. doi:10.1515/9783110891683.3.

Lefebvre, Claire. 2011. Creoles, Their Substrates, and Language Typology. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub.

Mondesir, Jones E., and Lawrence D. Carrington. 1992. Dictionary of St. Lucian Creole. Trends in Linguistics 7. Berlin ; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.