Substrate features of African origin

Implosives

A feature of Saramaccan that escaped notice until quite recently was the fact that it distinguished plain voiced /b, d/ phonemes from implosive voiced . This was first described in Haabo (2000), and is clearly an African feature. The distribution of plain and implosive stops over the sets of words of different origins is interesting, but has yet to be fully explained. Some examples follow:

English-derived items with plain /b/ are very rare. Voiced stops in nasal clusters are however always plain. This also applies in Ndyuka where voiced stops /b, d/ are otherwise normally pronounced as implosives . There is no phonemic contrast in Ndyuka, however.