English is an official language in the Philippines, along with Filipino, a standardized register originally based on Tagalog (Gonzalez 1998). The Philippines were a Spanish colony for over three centuries, but when the Americans took control in 1898, they immediately implemented English instruction in schools (Gonzalez 2004). It became much more widespread among Filipinos than Spanish ever was, and by the late 1960s, Philippine English was recognized as a distinct, nativized variety (Llamzon 1969). It is widely spoken throughout the country as a second language, alongside Filipino and approximately 180 other languages (Lewis, Simmons & Fennig 2016). It is also spoken in the home by a small number of Filipinos, especially among the upper class in Metro Manila (Gonzalez 1983, 1989) and other urban areas. There is a large body of literature on Philippine English. However, relatively few studies have focused on its sound system. The most detailed phonological descriptions of this variety have been by Tayao (2004, 2008), although there have also been previous sketches (Llamzon 1969, 1997; Gonzalez 1984). There has been very little phonetic research on Philippine English, apart from some work describing the vowel system (Pillai, Manueli & Dumanig 2010, Cruz 2015).

Many languages have a phonological pattern of regressive voicing assimilation, according to which an obstruent is required to match a following obstruent in voicing (e.g. Russian, Sanskrit). This restriction on the distribution of categories has parallels in the phonetic fact that an obstruent has a longer interval of glottal pulsing when it occurs before a voiced sound than when it occurs before a voiceless sound. It is proposed that the phonological pattern arises diachronically through a reanalysis of the phonetic pattern, beginning with a tendency for listeners to identify an obstruent before another obstruent as matching the latter in voicing. This paper reports on two experiments designed to test premises of this account. A production study explores how obstruent voicing in English is affected by voicing in a following segment. A perception study explores how the identification of voicing categories is impacted by the acoustic effects of following segment context. It is found that listeners tend to identify a fricative as voiceless if it is drawn from the position before a voiceless obstruent, but that a following voiced segment has no significant effect on voicing class identification. Implications for the diachronic account of regressive voicing assimilation are discussed.

The Extensions to the IPA for the transcription of disordered speech and voice quality (extIPA) were approved at the 1989 IPA Congress in Kiel (see Duckworth et al. 1990, Ball 1991). A transcription system for disordered speech needs to provide sufficient diversity of symbols and diacritics to account for the majority of observed phonetic variants. Creation of standard new symbols and diacritics for every observed variant is ultimately counterproductive. We submit that the following phenomena have been observed frequently enough and have sufficient diagnostic and therapeutic implications to warrant consideration as new extensions to the IPA. We do not imply, however, that these are the only atypical speech production phenomena that may, in the long run, be worthy of inclusion in a revised extIPA, and we look forward to further suggestions from clinicians and phoneticians.

Intonation has frequently been regarded by linguists as on the periphery of linguistics. The study of grammar began in the classical era (see Robins 1967) and the study of phonetics also goes back a very long way (see, for example, Allen 1953). But intonation has not figured prominently in phonetic writings (if we exclude discussion of word phenomena like Greek accent). Most bibliographies of intonation do not go further back than the twentieth century (e.g. Ladd 1979a), two exceptions being Pike (1945) and Crystal (1969). But there are sufficient early writings on various aspects of intonation to justify a new sub-branch of the history of linguistics, the history of intonology. This article seeks to inaugurate this sub-branch by tracing the origins of a central theoretical concept in modern intonation back to the seventeenth century and ultimately to the renaissance.

The Nuosu (Nosu) Yi language, or Northern Yi (北部彝语), is spoken by approximately two million people in southern Sichuan Province and northern Yunnan Province, China, the majority of whom are monolingual. Yi is a member of the Yi Branch of the Lolo-Burmese subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman family (Benedict 1972/2009, Bradley 1979), which includes some 50 languages, also called the Nisoic languages (Lama 2012) or Ngwi Group. The large (5 million) ethnic Yi nationality groups of Yunnan Province are distantly related. The third author, Lama Ziwo, who was 31 at the time of recording, produced, translated and transcribed the recorded audio data phonemically and participated in the laryngoscopic filming of the video data. He is a native speaker of the Suondip/Suondi dialect, and a fluent speaker of the Shypnra/Shengza dialect. It is the Shypnra/Shengza standard dialect that is being represented in this paper. The most distinguishing phonetic feature of Northern Yi is its systematic vocal register contrast (Matisoff 1972, Dai 1990) between two settings of the laryngeal constrictor mechanism, which are referred to as a lax (unconstricted) series and a tense (constricted) series (Edmondson et al. 2000, 2001). The contrast is realized as a distinction in resonance (spectral quality) rather than as contrasting phonation types as in some other forms of Yi or in other Tibeto-Burman languages (e.g. Bai). The consonantal inventory is large, with complex vocalic interactions, including interactions with two pairs of fricativized vowels. Northern Yi has 43 initial consonants, five pairs of vowels (or syllable rhymes), and three tones: 55, 33, and 21. Relevant reports on voice quality in related languages can be found in Maddieson & Ladefoged (1985) and Sun & Liu (1986).

Hmong languages, particularly White Hmong, are well studied for their complex tone systems that incorporate pitch, phonation, and duration differences. Still, prior work has made use mostly of tones elicited in their citation forms in carrier phrases. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of both the vowel and tone systems of White Hmong from recordings of read speech. We confirm several features of the language, including the presence of nasal vowels (rather than derived nasalized vowels through coarticulation with a coda [ŋ]), the description of certain tone contours, and the systematic presence of breathy and creaky voice on two of the tones. We also find little evidence of additional intonational f0 targets. However, we show that some tones vary greatly by their position in utterance, and propose novel descriptions for several of them. Finally, we show that $\textrm{H}1^{\!*}$ –H2*, a widely used measure of voice quality and phonation in Hmong and across languages, does not adequately distinguish modal from non-modal phonation in this data set, and argue that noise measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) are more robust to phonation differences in corpora with more variability.

Previous research has shown that pre-aspiration can be a phonemic and a variable linguistic feature susceptible to linguistic and extra-linguistic influences. In the case of Welsh, previous exploratory work has found the presence of pre-aspiration (Ball 1984, Morris 2010, Spooner 2016, Iosad forthcoming), but the phonetic and phonological properties of this feature and its sociophonetic patterning in the language are not known. This article presents analyses of the variety of Welsh spoken in Bethesda (Gwynedd). It reports the frequency of occurrence of pre-aspiration, its duration, and noisiness. As well as describing pre-aspiration, it attempts to ascertain the extent to which this feature is influenced by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Wordlist data were analysed from 16 Welsh–English bilinguals from Bethesda (Gwynedd, North Wales). Speakers were aged between 16 and 18 years old and the sample was stratified by speaker sex and home language (either Welsh or English). The results indicate that pre-aspiration is frequent in both fortis and lenis plosives (the latter of which are typically devoiced in Welsh). In addition to a number of linguistic influences on its production, both speaker sex and home language were found to be significant predictors of variation for some measures. The results are discussed with reference to previous studies of pre-aspiration in other languages and work on phonetic variation in Welsh–English bilingual speech.

If semiotics is the general theory of communicative signs (Morris, 1938: 80), then phonetics constitutes part of that theory, in the sense that phonetics tries to model the means by which communication is achieved through the use of spoken signs. The technical vocabulary of phonetics is thus a sub-set of the meta-language of semiotics, and one might reasonably expect that other terms and concepts from semiotic theory, such as that of INDEXICAL and ICONIC signs (Feibleman, 1946: 91), might be illuminating when applied to the subject-matter of phonetics.

Electropalatographic data on the frequency of occurrence of assimilatory processes in Catalan C1##C2 sequences, where ## is inserted at the boundary between two consecutive words, reveal that regressive place assimilations operate more often on C1 = /n/ than on C1 = /t/ and are triggered by /ɡ/ rather than by the labials /pbm/ and the voiceless velar stop /k/. Regressive manner assimilations involving nasality and laterality are facilitated by homorganicity between the two consecutive consonants and thus apply more frequently in the clusters /pmtntltʎ/, where C1 and C2 share the same labial or dentoalveolar place of articulation, than in the sequences /pntmkmkn/, where the two consonants are heterorganic; on the other hand, /k/ is less prone than /pt/ to become nasal when followed by /mn/. Place assimilatory processes apply more often for some speakers than for others, and their frequency of occurrence increases whenever C1 is embedded in a frequent or function word. The articulatory motivation for some of these place and manner assimilatory processes, and the extent to which they are complete or partial, are also investigated.

The International Phonetic Association is not usually considered as a group of theoreticians. If the members have a self-image, they probably consider themselves as practical people, who apply their particular skills to real problems such as pronunciation teaching, speech pathology, the description of spoken languages, and speech recognition. They probably do not think of themselves as part of one of the very few organized groups in the world that promulgates an official theory about its subject matter. But that is precisely what the International Phonetic Association does. It sanctions an official set of symbols for representing the sounds of spoken language. By doing so it prescribes a certain way of describing sounds; the symbols are, after all, just symbols. They are shorthand ways of representing certain information, namely, the choices permitted by the phonetic theory.

Ferguson (1972) described the distribution of æ and æ: in his native Philadelphia speech and pointed out that these two varieties of low, front vowel have different distributions in different dialects. He ended his paper with a plea for further data collection in more dialects that would lead ‘to better understanding of the synchronic system and to more satisfactory hypotheses about the diachrony’ (1972:273). This paper is in response to his request and consists of a description of the distribution of æ and æ: in my native Melbourne speech.

In their book on British English accents and dialects, Hughes & Trudgill (1979: 51–3) include a brief study of the South Wales variety of English, based on the speech of informants from Neath and Pontypridd. Although in the main their description rings true, it does leave some gaps and contain some inaccuracies, sufficient to prompt me to offer the following, somewhat fuller notes on the South Welsh pronunciation of English, with particular reference to the speech of my native West Glamorgan (WG). My comments relate primarily to the Port Talbot variety of WG, but since this variety is similar in most respects to those found in nearby Neath and Swansea and their surrounding areas, my remarks may, for the most part, be taken as applying to WG speech in general. The accents found in the adjoining south-western part of the county of Mid Glamorgan, in towns such as Maesteg or Porthcawl, are also similar to the Port Talbot variety, and thus share most of the characteristics attributed here to WG speech.

This illustration focuses on the variety of Pashayi (also, Pashai) spoken in the Dara-i-Nur valley of Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan (approximately, N 34.682 E 70.581); the ISO 639-3 code for this variety is psi. According to Lewis (2009) there are 54,400 speakers of this variety, and about 216,000 speakers of all Pashayi dialects. The most comprehensive published study of Pashayi to date is Morgernstierne's two-volume grammar (Morgenstierne 1973, 1944), which is helpfully summarized in Bashir (2003).

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.

French intonation has so far received far less attention from linguists than English intonation. What is available on the subject tends to deal with specific issues and is usually based on read prose rather than on spontaneous speech. The aim of this paper is to provide an overall picture of the intonation of ‘standard’ conversational French so that the intonational resources of French may be compared with those of English. The primary data consists of about one hour of recorded conversations; the contrasts have been identified using auditory techniques and the accuracy of the transcription and reliability of the descriptive statements have been checked by analysing the corpus instrumentally with a mingograf.

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.

The ‘voice quality symbols’ (VoQS) transcription system for voice quality was introduced some 20 years ago, and no major revision has been undertaken since then. In this account we describe the first major revision of the VoQS chart, these changes being mostly in the form of additions to the section on phonation types, but include also changes to the layout of the supralaryngeal settings section. These reflect recent developments in the understanding of the physiological underpinnings of sounds produced in the larynx including certain phonation types.

Sumi (also known by its exonym ‘Sema’) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nagaland, North-east India. It is one of the major languages of the state, with an estimated 242,000 speakers living primarily in Zunheboto district, as well as in the major cities of Kohima and Dimapur. Bradley (1997) places Sumi (referred to as Sema), among the ‘Southern Naga’ languages, which include Angami (also known as Tenyidie) and Ao, in contrast to the ‘Northern Naga’ languages such as Konyak and Nocte. Burling (2003) offers a more conservative classification, placing Sumi (referred to as Simi) in an ‘Angami-Pochuri’ group containing Angami, Chakhesang (Chokri and Kheza) and Mao. Four main dialects of Sumi have been identified: the Western dialect, the Eastern dialect, the Chizolimi dialect, and the Central dialect. The Central dialect is the standard dialect used in published works of Sumi (Sreedhar 1976: 4–5).

The present study examined lexical stress patterns in Uyghur, a Turkic language. The main goal of this research was to isolate and determine which acoustic parameters provide cues to stress in Uyghur. A number of studies have investigated the phonetic correlates of lexical stress across the world's languages, with stressed syllables often longer in duration, higher in pitch, and greater in amplitude. The present study systematically investigated the acoustic cues to stress in Uyghur, examining duration, fundamental frequency, and amplitude. Three experiments were conducted: one utilizing minimal pairs in Uyghur, one examining disyllabic nouns in Uyghur that contrasted in the first syllable, and one investigating the interaction of lexical stress with Uyghur sentence intonation. The data consistently show that duration was a robust cue to stress in Uyghur, with less consistent effects for intensity. The data also clearly show that fundamental frequency was not a cue to lexical stress in Uyghur. Uyghur does not use the fundamental frequency to distinguish stressed from unstressed syllables. The results suggest that Uyghur does not pattern like a pitch-accent language (e.g. Turkish), but rather like a stress-accent language.