Liquids Post-vocalic R

/r/ as the coda of a syllable is generally not found in basilectal Hawai‘i Creole. What is /ɑr/ in General American English is realized as [ɑ], for example in [hɑd] ‘hard’, [pakiŋ] ‘parking’; /εr/ is realized as [e] when followed by another sound: [sked] ‘scared’; /ɔr/ and /or/ are realized as [ɔ] in stressed syllables and [o] in unstressed syllables, e.g. ['fɔtʃen] ‘fortune’ vs. [p^ho'tʃreɪ] ‘portray’. (The exceptions are the grammatical morphemes [fo] and [mo] derived from for and more.)

In word-final position, what is post-vocalic R in other varieties is syllabified as [ɑ] in basilectal Hawai‘i Creole after /i/, /u/, /o/, /AI/ and /e/. Consider the examples [diɑ] ‘deer’, [puɑ] ‘poor’, [stoɑ] ‘store’, [fɑɪɑ] ‘fire’, [wælfeɑ] ‘welfare’.

As mentioned above, the only post-vocalic R or R-colored vowel in Hawai‘i Creole is [зr], and it is found only in stressed syllables: [bзrd] ‘bird’, [ri'tεrn] ‘return’. In unstressed syllables, what is [зr] or [ər] in other varieties is realized as [e] when followed by another sound and as [ɑ] at the end of a word: ['rɑbet] ‘Robert’, ['reked] ‘record (noun)’, ['p^hepɑ] ‘paper’, ['fiŋgɑ]  ‘finger’.