Implosivas nas línguas crioulas do Golfo da Guiné: uma análise preliminar

This study describes and analyzes the phonetic features of the bilabial [ɓ] and alveolar [ɗ] implosives in Lung’Ie, Santome and Angolar, Creole languages spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Implosives are typologically marked consonants, associated with the typology of African languages (Clements; Rialland, 2008). This study used an exploratory methodology, based on Laboratory Phonology (Ohala, 1995; Albano, 2017). We used speech data collected in São Tomé and Príncipe in 2019 and 2023 (Agostinho, 2019; Agostinho; Nunes, 2023). We analyzed 147 items with contexts of <b> and <d> in initial onset: 53 items in Lung’Ie, 53 in Angolar and 41 in Santome. We found 79.2% of implosives in Lung’Ie, 83% in Angolar and 90.2% in Santome, indicating that the initial onset position is productive for the occurrence of implosives. In this data, we identified the occurrence of implosives in initial and medial onset in Lung’Ie and Angolar, but only in initial onset in Santome. In the three languages, the implosives preceded the oral vowels /e, a, o, ɔ, i, u/ and the nasalized vowels [ã, ẽ, õ, ũ]. The low-mid vowel /ɛ/ occurred only in the Angolar data. The occurrence of long vowels /aa, ee, ɛɛ, ii, uu/ with implosives was identified only in Lung’Ie. Furthermore, the implosives occurred in the syllabic patterns predicted by the phonotactic structure of the three languages. Finally, we argue that the implosives [ɓ, ɗ] and plosives [b, d] are in variation as allophones of /ɓ, ɗ/ in the Gulf of Guinea Creoles.