Loanword phonology in Trio: Patterns in phonotactic adaptations

In this paper, I provide a first look at the phonology of loanwords in Trio, a Cariban language spoken in Suriname and Brazil. Because of Trio’s restrictive phonotactics, many loanwords are adapted through vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion. Using data from Meira (1999), Meira & Muysken (2017) and Carlin (2017), I compiled a corpus of 114 loanwords in Trio, from various source languages such as Dutch, Portuguese and Sranan. Analysis of this corpus shows that different strategies for vowel epenthesis are used systematically, and that there is a surprisingly high rate of consonant deletion which is as of yet unexplained.