In this 2005 interview, Peter Ladefoged, Distinguished Professor of Phonetics Emeritus at UCLA and USC Adjunct Professor, spoke candidly about his long and distinguished career as a scholar and instructor, as a former President of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), and as an editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA). Professor Ladefoged died on 24 January 2006, and numerous tributes to him have since appeared, including in JIPA 36.1 (June 2006). Among the topics treated in this interview are: the history and future of phonetics, the founding and growth of the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory, and Ladefoged's views on scholarly writing and on the place of phonetics both within linguistics and within humanistic and social scientific disciplines, more broadly. Professor Ladefoged had read proofs of the interview and approved the text, which was completed in the fall of 2005. The text of this interview was originally published in Semiotica 158 (2006) and is reprinted here with permission from Mouton de Gruyter.

In Guinaang Bontok, there is a phonological contrast between singletons and geminates in all consonants (/p t k ? b d g m n ŋ l s w j/) (Reid 1963, 1973; Thurgood 1997). All phonological geminates except for the oral voiced stop geminates are phonetically long consonants (Reid 1963), allowing a phonological distinction which is primarily based on phonetic duration for nasals, fricatives, liquids, glides and voiceless stops. In a cross-linguistic examination of geminates (Thurgood 1993), there were more languages listed as examples for having stop and nasal geminates than for glide geminates, and it was suggested that alveolar was the cross-linguistically preferred place of articulation for geminate consonants. In this study, it was hypothesized that the cross-linguistically less common length contrasts, such as the length contrasts in glides, were phonetically less clear than the more common ones, such as contrasts between short and long stop and nasal consonants. Similarly, it was hypothesized that contrasts in the cross-linguistically common place of articulation (i.e. alveolar) is phonetically clearer than less common contrasts (e.g. velar). In order to test these hypotheses, duration measurements were conducted on single and geminate consonants in Guinaang Bontok. The average durational contrast between short and long glides was smaller than the contrast in stop and nasal consonants. The hypothesis was therefore partially supported.

This paper reports results of a quantitative phonetic study of Kabardian, a Northwest Caucasian language that is of typological interest from a phonetic standpoint. A number of cross-linguistically rare properties are examined. These features include the phonetic realization of Kabardian's small vowel inventory, which contains only three contrastive vowel qualities (two short vowels and one long vowel), spectral characteristics of the ten supralaryngeal voiceless fricatives of Kabardian, as well as the acoustic, palatographic, and aerodynamic characteristics of ejective fricatives, an extremely rare type of segment cross-linguistically. In addition, basic properties of the consonant stop series are explored, including closure duration and voice onset time, in order to test postulated universals linking these properties to place of articulation and laryngeal setting.

For many years, the passage ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) has been used for phonetic research into different languages. However, there are many shortcomings with the passage for the description of varieties of English, including the absence of some sounds, such as /[zcy ]/ and syllable-initial /θ/, problems with the text for the measurement of rhythm, and issues regarding acoustic measurements of /æ/ and /I/. An alternative passage, ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf’, is suggested, and measurements of the monophthongs based on recordings of the Wolf passage by three RP British English speakers are compared with similar measurements of the vowels in the NWS passage.

Mambay is spoken by about 15,000 people in Cameroon and Chad. The majority of the population lives in the North Province of Cameroon, while the remaining group of 3,000 speakers is found immediately across the border in the Mayo-Kebbi Prefecture of southwestern Chad (Grimes 2000: 43, 68). There is little variation among dialects of the language.

The Sandawe language is spoken in the Kondoa district of central Tanzania by approximately 40,000 people. Sandawe has been widely assumed to be a member of the Khoisan language family, but recent research has cast doubt on the position that such a family exists (Güldemann & Vossen 2000). The Sandawe language can be divided into an eastern variety and a western variety. The differences between these two varieties are slight and gradual. The orthography used in the following description was decided upon in 2002 by a group of Sandawe speakers representing different parts of the language area. Early research on Sandawe phonetics and phonology was undertaken by Dempwolff (1916) and Copland (1938). More recent studies are found in Tucker & Bryan (1977), Elderkin (1989, 1992), Wright, Maddieson, Ladefoged & Sands (1995), Maddieson, Ladefoged & Sands (1999) and Hunziker, Hunziker & Eaton (2005).

Zurich German belongs to the High Alemannic subgroup of Alemannic, a dialect group forming part of Upper German (cf. Wiesinger 1983: 835). It is the dialect spoken in the city and in most parts of the canton of Zurich. According to recent census data, the canton of Zurich (whose area roughly coincides with the areal extension of Zurich German) has somewhat more than 1.2 million inhabitants, but since immigration both from other German-speaking areas and from more remote linguistic backgrounds plays an important role for the largest city and the largest canton of Switzerland, the number of speakers of Zurich German is certainly lower.

Georgian is a Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language spoken by 4 to 5 million people in the Republic of Georgia, with small diaspora communities spread out in a few republics of the former Soviet Union, Iran, and Turkey. Shanidze (1973) distinguishes six groups of Georgian dialects: Dasavluri (Imeruli, Guruli, Rachuli, Lechkhumuri); Ingilouri; Kartlur-Kakhuri (Kartluri, Kakhuri, Javakhuri, Meskhuri, Kizikuri); Mtiulur-Pshauri (Mtiulur-Gudamakruli, Pshauri); Pkhouri (Khevsuruli, Mokheuri, Tushuri); and Samkhret-Dasavluri (Acharuli, Imerkheuli). The Kartluri dialect is considered the basis of standard or literary Georgian. It is spoken in Kartli, an eastern Georgian province where Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, is located. Standard literary Georgian is discussed here. One male speaker from Tbilisi (the second author) was consulted for all the data presented in the illustration.