Constraints on the coda: The distribution of nasals

Idealized JamE has /aun/ [aun] as the phoneme sequence in the pronunciation of words such as ‘brown’, ‘down’ and ‘town’. The JamC variant, [onŋ] , is a highly stigmatized but frequently occurring variant in JamE. The stigma associated with [onŋ] is determined by the lexical item within which it appears. Thus, idealized JamE /dauntaun/ [dountoun] ‘downtown’ is very frequently produced as [doɳtaun] , i.e. with the [oŋ] variant on ‘down’ but not on ‘town’.