Phonologically, they are simpler than any of the languages involved in their evolution. The sounds of a pidgin or creole are likely to be fewer and less complicated in their possible arrangements than those of the corresponding standard language. Often, they have a five- or seven-vowel system.
For example, Tok Pisin makes use of only five basic vowels and also has fewer consonants than English. No contrast is possible between words like it and eat, or pin and fin, or sip, ship, and chip: the necessary vowel and consonant distinctions (contrasts) are not present. Speakers of Tok Pisin distinguish a ship from a sheep by calling the first a sip and the second a sipsip. It is also because of the lack of the /p/–/f/ distinction that some written versions of Tok Pisin record certain words with p spellings, whereas others record the same words with f spellings. So far as speakers of Tok Pisin are concerned, it does not make any difference if you say wanpela or wanfela(‘one’); you will be judged to have said the words in the same way, any difference being no more important to speakers of Tok Pisin than the difference to us between typical North American and British English pronunciations of the middle consonant sound in butter. While the numbers of sounds used in pidgins and creoles may be smaller than in the corresponding standard languages, they also tend to ‘vary’ more as to their precise quality. One additional point is worth stressing. A language like English often has complicated phonological relationships between words (or morphemes, the small bits of meaning in words) that are closely related, e.g., the first vowel in type and typical, the c in space and spacious, and the different sounds of the ‘plural’ ending in cats, dogs, and boxes. The technical term for this is morphophonemic variation. Such variation is not found in pidgins, but the development of such variation may be one characteristic of creolization, the process by which a pidgin becomes a creole.
