Sio Language - Phonology - Consonants (current Orthography)

Consonants (current Orthography)

When Stephen and Dawn Clark of SIL International began to work with Sio speakers in 1985, the latter expressed a desire to revise their orthography to make it more similar to what people had become familiar with in Tok Pisin and English. The eventual results are tabulated in the following chart. The community at first resisted writing the labialized consonants as digraphs, since they clearly regarded them as unit phonemes. They insisted on writing the labialization as superscripts rather than as separate segments. However, by 1992, after many materials were produced in the new orthography, Sio teachers and church circuit officers approved writing the indicator of labialization on the same line, thus accepting mw instead of mʷ (Clark 1993).