This article presents the first quantitative study into coronal stop deletion in Surinamese Dutch. It maps the frequency and conditioning of word-final [t]-deletion in the Dutch spoken by 22 Creole women in five speech settings and compares these data to results of previous studies on European Dutch. A multivariate analysis of 7,418 tokens of word-final /t/ preceded by an obstruent indicates that [t]-deletion is a highly frequent phenomenon in Surinamese Dutch, strongly influenced by both the segment following the final stop and the formality of the speech setting. The age of the speaker, the morphological status of /t/, the segment preceding the final stop, the frequency of the word containing the final stop, and the cluster length are also observed to be relevant, but the impact of these factors is much smaller and highly dependent on the phonetic context. Interestingly, the conditioning of [t]-deletion diverges from the one observed in European Dutch in some respects, which, along with the observed age effect, substantiates the idea that an endoglossic Dutch norm is developing in Suriname and that there are fundamental differences between Surinamese and European Dutch.*

It is well-known that English variable word-final coronal stop deletion (CSD) is less likely to occur when the final coronal stop instantiates the inflectional suffix -ed. It is sometimes hypothesised that the reason for this effect is to avoid the homophony between past and present tenses that would result from the suffix -ed being deleted. This reasoning suggests another hypothesis: that CSD should also be disfavoured when it would create homophony between two distinct lexical items, such as bald and ball. In this squib, we test that hypothesis on data from a corpus of Philadelphia English. We find no evidence that probability of CSD is affected by homophony avoidance between lexical items. This weakens the case that homophony avoidance is at play in disfavouring CSD in the -ed case, and may have implications for the theory of homophony avoidance in phonology in general.