Vowels

Both Mihalic and Laycock identify a five basic vowel system: /a, e, i, o, u/. As with Bislama, these appear to be fairly close to cardinal IPA values, although little research on variation has been carried out. These are treated in turn below, showing some of the English source vowels for each.

It should be noted that although doti ‘dirty’ is the commonly cited form, I found that most speakers surveyed used deti, more similar to the English pronunciation.

In addition, a number of diphthongs may be heard in Tok Pisin. While a greater range may be heard in varieties strongly influenced by bilingualism in English, the following are generally in common use in typical rural Tok Pisin:

The English /aɪə/ is also represented (paia ‘fire’), while /auə/ is generally heard with a semivowel: /auə/ pawa ‘power’.

There is no evidence of contrastive use of vowel length. Standard written Tok Pisin tends to approximate the phonemic values in most cases, except that <ng> covers both /ŋ/ and /ŋg/, and geminate vowels such as in baim ‘to buy’ are not indicated (Pawley 1975).