We examined the production of the Irish initial mutation eclipsis in two speaking styles. In initial mutation phenomena, a word appears with a different initial sound depending on the lexical or morphosyntactic environment (e.g. croí [kɾɣi] ‘(a) heart’ (radical form), (a) chroí [xɾɣi] ‘(his) heart/darling’ (séimhiú-lenition form), and (a) gcroí [ɡɾɣi] ‘their heart/darling’ (eclipsis form)). The goals of the study were:

1. (i) to examine whether there are acoustic differences between the initial consonants of radical word forms (e.g. [ɡ] of gruig ‘(a) frown/scowl’) and the corresponding consonants of eclipsis forms (e.g. [ɡ] of gcroí), as has been found for similar phenomena in other languages;

2. (ii) to examine variability in the patterns of initial mutation in the speech of present-day speakers of Irish.

Our analyses offer limited evidence that there may be phonetic differences between radical and corresponding eclipsis consonants, but the current data do not allow us to rule out alternative explanations. The realization of initial mutations in semi-spontaneous speech differed dramatically both from that of read speech and from the expectations of the traditional grammar. The results suggest that the realization of eclipsis and other initial mutations may be style- or register-dependent. We also found some evidence that it may vary by consonant type, in part due to phonological frequency patterns of the language.

Preaspirated voiceless stops, a well-documented feature of Scottish Gaelic (Ní Chasaide 1985, Clayton 2010, Nance & Stuart-Smith 2013), have also been reported in the English spoken in the Hebrides island chain (Borgstrøm 1940, Wells 1982, Shuken 1984). However, a detailed description of preaspiration in Hebrides English has previously been unavailable. This paper presents the results of a phonetic study of preaspirated voiceless stops in Hebrides English, based on the speech of 24 English–Scottish Gaelic bilinguals from nine regions within the Hebrides island chain. The paper describes the effect of linguistic features on the duration and frequency of preaspiration, including place of articulation, word position, and vowel context. The paper also considers the role of social factors, including speakers’ geographic origin, age, and gender, finding that preaspiration is more frequent among women and among older speakers, especially older female speakers from Lewis. The paper concludes that preaspiration is likely to be an obsolescent feature in Hebrides English, rather than an innovative feature as in other varieties of English such as Tyneside or Aberystwyth (Docherty & Foulkes 1999, Foulkes, Docherty & Watt 2001, Hejná 2015).

Across languages, there is a tendency to avoid length contrasts in the most vowel-like consonant classes, such as glides or laryngeals. Such gaps could arise from the difficulty of determining where the boundary between vowel and consonant lies when the transition between them is gradual. This claim is tested in Persian (Farsi), which has length contrasts in all classes of consonants, including glides and laryngeals. Persian geminates were compared to singletons in three different speaking rates and seven different consonant classes. Geminates were found to have longer constriction intervals than singletons, and this length effect interacted with both speaking rate and manner of articulation. In one of two perception experiments, Persian speakers identified consonants as geminate or singleton in stimuli in which the constriction duration was systematically varied. The perceptual boundary between geminates and singletons was most sharply defined for obstruents and least so for laryngeals, as reflected by the breadth of the changeover region in the identification curve. In the other perception experiment, subjects identified the length class of glides differing in constriction duration and formant transition duration. Longer formant transitions led to more geminate responses and to a broader changeover interval.

The Azerbaijani, Azerbaijanian or Azeri language belongs to the western group of the southwestern, or Oghuz, branch of the Turkic language family and is mainly spoken in Azerbaijan and Iran. Azerbaijani is the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan and over 80% of its population use it as their first language (Johanson 2010). Among non-Persian languages in Iran, Azerbaijani, with approximately 15–20 million native speakers, has the largest number of speakers (Crystal 2010). In total, more than 50 million people speak Azerbaijani (Khalilzadeh 2013).

Munji (aka Munjani or Munjiwar; ISO 639-3: [mnj]) is spoken in the Kuran wa Munjan district of Badakhshan province in Afghanistan. Munji is classified as an Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Iranian, Eastern, Southeastern, Pamir language (Lewis 2009). There are about 5,300 Munji speakers (Beyer & Beck 2011). There are two main dialects, which divide into the northern and southern halves of the valley (see Figure 1). These dialects exhibit some regular sound changes and a small percentage of lexical differences. Munji speakers are aware of the differences, but there is no trouble in mutual understanding.

Khowar (ISO 639-3: khw) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by 200,000–300,000 (Decker 1992: 31–32; Bashir 2003: 843) people in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (formerly North-West Frontier Province). The majority of the speakers are found in Chitral (a district and erstwhile princely state bordering Afghanistan, see Figure 1), where the language is used as a lingua franca, but there are also important pockets of speaker groups in adjacent areas of Gilgit-Baltistan and Swat District as well as a considerable number of recent migrants to larger cities such as Peshawar and Rawalpindi (Decker 1992: 25–26). Its closest linguistic relative is Kalasha, a much smaller language spoken in a few villages in southern Chitral (Morgenstierne 1961: 138; Strand 1973: 302, 2001: 252). While Khowar has preserved a number of features (phonological, morphological as well as lexical) now lost in other Indo-Aryan languages of the surrounding Hindukush-Karakoram mountain region, it has, over time, incorporated a massive amount of lexical material from neighbouring or influential Iranian languages (Morgenstierne 1936) – and with it, new phonological distinctions. Certain features might also be attributable to formerly dominant languages (e.g. Turkic), or to linguistic substrates, either in the form of, or related to, the language isolate Burushaski, or other, now extinct, languages previously spoken in the area (Morgenstierne 1932: 48, 1947: 6; Bashir 2007: 208–214). There is relatively little dialectal variation among the speakers in Chitral itself, probably attributable to the relative recency of the present expansion of the language (Morgenstierne 1932: 50).

Telugu (tel) belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is spoken by 7.19% of the population of India (Census of India 2001b). At different stages of its development over centuries, the vocabulary of Telugu has been considerably influenced by various languages, such as Sanskrit, Prakrit,2 Perso-Arabic and English. A major consequence of this influence is that the phonemic system of Telugu has been extended by additional sets of sounds. Thus, the aspirates /pʰ bʱ tʰ dʱ ʈʰ ɖʱ ʧʰ ʤʱ kʰ ɡʱ/ and fricatives /ʃ ʂ h/, absent in the native phonemic system, entered the language through Sanskrit borrowings. Similarly, /f/ entered the language through Perso-Arabic and English borrowings. Some of the sounds from Perso-Arabic and English sources were nativized, for example, Perso-Arabic and English phoneme /ʃ/ was rendered as /ʂ/, which had already entered the language through borrowings from Sanskrit/Prakrit; Perso-Arabic phonemes /qx ɣ z/ were rendered as /kkʰ ɡ ʤ/ respectively; and the English phoneme /θ/ was rendered as /tʰ/. English borrowings also resulted in re-phonemicization. In native Telugu vocabulary, [ɛ] and [ӕː] are allophones of /e/ and /eː/ respectively, but they acquire phonemic status when words borrowed from English are included in the total vocabulary of the language.