cw- and time-resolved photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy is employed to evaluate dominant mechanisms for light emission in GayIn1-yNxP1-x alloys grown by gas source molecular-beam epitaxy on GaAs substrates. Different from other direct band gap dilute nitrides, the low temperature PL emission was shown to be largely attributed to radiative transitions involving spatially separated localized electron-hole pairs. The observed charge separation is tentatively attributed to the long range CuPt ordering promoted by the presence of nitrogen. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.