Stops

The most heavy creole varieties typically do not show contrastive voicing for stops. They may appear voiced or unvoiced, although there is a general preference for voiceless (unaspirated) stops in all environments. Where a contrast is made between voiced and voiceless stops, the voicing distinction is typically lost word-finally; hence pairs of words such as dog and dock will be homophonous. Intervocalic flapping (or tapping) is widespread in these varieties.

Hawai‘i Creole shows both voiced and voiceless stops and there is aspiration where a force of air follows the release of the voiceless stop. Aspiration is generally more in evidence than in other varieties of English because of the prevalence of syllables with secondary stress (for example, it occurs medially in words such as carton and kitten). Where they occur word-finally, however, voiceless stops are typically unreleased or glottalized. In addition, Hawai‘i Creole shows affricated pronunciations of /t/ and /d/ where they occur before /r/.

A particularly striking feature of the varieties of Melanesian Pidgin is the presence of prenasalized voiced stops; in other words, /b, d, g/ are pronounced as /^mb, ^md and ^mg/. Fiji English also shows prenasalization, but only of /b/.