The Nasalization of The Haitian Creole determiner La in Non-Nasal Contexts: A Variationist Sociolinguistic Study

This study focuses on the nasalization of the postposed determiner /la/ (LÃ) after an oral segment (e.g. chat la/lã [ʃatla/lã] ‘the cat’, and peyi a/an [pejija/ã), a linguistic environment where the nasal variants generally do not occur. In his 1991 pilot study, Valdman demonstrated that there was a correlation between younger middle-class Port-au-Prince speakers and the nasalization of the determiner when following an oral segment.

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