The Hmu language is spoken by approximately 1,250,000 people who reside in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture (黔东南苗族侗族自治州), Guizhou Province (贵州省), the People's Republic of China (Wang & Mao 1995: 3–4; Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2016).

Several researchers have noted that intervocalic consonants are unusually long in Navajo (Sapir & Hoijer 1967, Young & Morgan 1987, McDonough & Ladefoged 1993). This paper explores intervocalic consonant duration in the Lheidli dialect of Dakelh (Carrier) in order to determine whether the long intervocalic consonants found in Navajo are characteristic of other Athabaskan languages as well. It is shown that Lheidli intervocalic consonants are substantially longer overall than (a) consonants in other positions within Lheidli, (b) vowels within Lheidli, and (c) singletons and geminates in other non-Athabaskan languages. Furthermore, intervocalic consonant duration is at least in part a function of morphological structure, with intervocalic consonants lengthening to signal a stem morpheme boundary. The data presented here provide new evidence for the existence of a language-specific phonetic component of grammar as well as for the interaction between phonetics and morphology.

The present study aims to document the developmental profile of static and dynamic acoustic features of vowel productions in monolingual Mandarin-speaking children aged between three and six years in comparison to adults. Twenty-nine monolingual Mandarin children and 12 native Mandarin adults were recorded producing ten Mandarin disyllabic words containing five monophthongal vowel phonemes /a i u y ɤ/. F1 and F2 values were measured at five equidistant temporal locations (the 20–35–50–65–80% points of the vowel's duration) and normalized. Scatter plots showed clear separations between vowel categories although the size of individual vowel categories exhibited a decreasing trend as the age increased. This indicates that speakers as young as three years old could separate these five Mandarin vowels in the acoustic space but they were still refining the acoustic properties of their vowel production as they matured. Although the tested vowels were monophthongs, they were still characterized by distinctive formant movement patterns. Mandarin children generally demonstrated formant movement patterns comparable to those of adult speakers. However, children still showed positional variation and differed from adults in the magnitudes of spectral change for certain vowels. This indicates that vowel development is a long-term process which extends beyond three years of age.

Until comparatively recently, the diphthong systems of southern English accents have appeared virtually symmetrical, and such an ideally symmetrical system for the closing and centring diphthongs is shown in Figures 1 and 2. (The diphthong /ɔI/, which of course does upset the symmetry, is omitted for the sake of exposition. Historically too this omission is well-motivated, as this diphthong was a borrowing from Norman French (Gimson, 1962: 132), and still has a limited distribution (Gimson, 1962: 148).)

In this article we note that diacritics, both in terms of their definition by the IPA, and in studies of transcriber reliability, are treated as a single group. Further, they are usually treated as being used purely to refine the meaning of a sound and, as such, as having less status phonetically than full symbols. It is argued here that diacritics should be classified into at least two major categories, and it is shown how one of these categories is the equivalent of a ‘full’ symbol. Apart from the implications this has for reliability measures, it is argued in conclusion that a more neutral definition of diacritic by the IPA is required.

Makasar is an Austronesian language belonging to the South Sulawesi subgroup within the large Western-Malayo Polynesian family. It is spoken by about two million people in the province of South Sulawesi in Indonesia, and is the second largest language on the island of Sulawesi (behind Bugis, with about three million speakers). The phonology is notable for the large number of geminate and pre-glottalised consonant sequences, while the morphology is characterised by highly productive affixation and pervasive encliticisation of pronominal and aspectual elements. The language has a literary tradition including detailed local histories (Cummings 2002), and over the centuries has been represented orthographically in many ways: with two indigenous Indic or aksara-based scripts, a system based on Arabic script, and a variety of Romanised conventions. From at least the early 18th century Macassan sailors travelled regularly to northern Australia to collect and process trepang or sea cucumber (Macknight 1976), and many loanwords passed into Aboriginal languages of the northern part of Australia (Evans 1992, 1997).

Dari, or Afghan Persian (Indo-European, Iranian, Southwestern; ISO 639-3: prs; Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013), is one of the national languages of Afghanistan, and a language of wider communication in much of the country. It is one of the three major Persian varieties, the others being Farsi (or Iranian Persian) and Tajiki (or Tajik Persian). Afghans refer to Dari either as [dɐˈɾi] or [fʌɾˈsi].

The vowels /i/ and /I/ are not contrastive before /r/ in American English, and the phonetics literature is equivocal about which symbol to use for the nucleus in words such as beer. Similarly /e/ and /ε/ are not contrastive before /r/, and the literature contains varied references to one or the other in words such as bear. The purpose of this study was to investigate these vowels by acoustic measurements, discriminant analyses, and listening tests. Eleven men and ten women residing in southern Michigan recorded /r/-final monosyllables (beer, bear, hear, hair), as well as words containing /i, I e, ε with other finals, such as beet, bit, bait, bet. Acoustic measurements included the first three formants at steady state. The high front vowel in /r/-final syllables (beer, hear) showed formant values intermediate between /i/ and /I/, but closer to /i/, and the mid front vowel (in bear and hair) was intermediate between /e/ and /ε/, but closer to /e/. Discriminant analysis using the first three formants and listening tests using 60 ms vowel excerpts yielded results consistent with the idea that the pre-/r/ vowels are acoustically intermediate between their tense and lax neighbors but resemble /i/ and /e/ more closely than /I/ and /ε/.

The labial flap is a speech sound which has received little attention in the literature. In this paper, we document the articulation of the sound, including audio and video data from Mono (D.R. Congo, Ubangian). The sound is attested in over sixty languages and has been incorporated into the phonological system of at least a dozen of them. The sound is easily describable in terms of values of phonological features or phonetic parameters, and it appears to have arisen independently in at least two regions of the world. These factors argue for the inclusion of the sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The English definite article has two major allomorphs: prevocalic /ðiː/ and preconsonantal /ðə/. Recent studies have shown changes to definite article allomorphy in some English varieties. Younger speakers, particularly from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, often use /ðə/ prevocalically rather than /ðiː/. The prevocalic definite article (PVDA) /ðiː/ facilitates management of vowel hiatus because it supports the emergence of [j] in preventing vowel adjacency (e.g. the ash [ðiːjœʃ]). An alternative strategy for separating adjacent vowels is glottalisation or glottal stop ([ðiːʔœʃ]). Few studies have explored the relationship between the vowel in the PVDA and hiatus management during the process of change. We report a diachronic analysis of Australian English (AusE) PVDA and associated hiatus management across a 50-year period (∼1960s to ∼2010s) and a synchronic analysis of present-day speakers from mainstream (MS) and non-mainstream (non-MS) (diverse) backgrounds using two read-sentence contexts. The aim is to provide insight into the process of change and factors that may influence its progression. Speech data from adolescents recorded in 1959/1960 were compared with recordings from Mainstream AusE-speaking (MS) young people recorded in the 2010s. Results showed significantly greater incidence of schwa in the PVDA and hiatus-breaking glottalisation in the modern data, particularly amongst females. The synchronic analysis comparing present-day MS and non-MS speakers showed increased use of glottalisation in females and non-MS speakers. Additionally, acoustic analysis showed more schwa-like productions in the PVDA by non-MS speakers. Of key importance in both analyses is that glottalisation was more prevalent than schwa, possibly indicating glottalisation triggered the change.

The Association must define and communicate its officially accepted symbols to other organizations and professionals, including publishers, dictionary makers, computer-systems specialists, and programmers. Accordingly, it was decided that each accepted symbol or diacritic should be assigned a unique numerical equivalent, independent of computer-coding conventions, and a unique name which provides a mnemonic description of the character shape. Symbols that have been used in earlier versions of the IPA, but deleted in later revisions, should retain a number, and name, for reference purposes. The numerical equivalent (IPA Number) is to be regarded as a communication-interchange standard, to serve as a basis for creating computer-code translation tables from various phonetic-character-set software to the common IPA Number. This IPA Number is not implemented directly in computer format (for example, ASCII), but is expressed as a simple numerical directory of digit triples to serve as a unique reference. The IPA Number can also serve as a typesetter's guide to the Phonetic Symbol Chart. The systematic numerical listing represents the IPA symbols as presented in the Chart. Therefore, the first digit of the triple indicates the symbol category; inn for accepted IPA consonant symbols, 2nn for former IPA consonant symbols and non-IPA consonant symbols, 3nn for vowels, 4nn for segmental diacritics, 5nn for suprasegmental symbols; 6nn-8nn are reserved for future specification (e.g., for symbols for voice quality settings or for pathological speech). The digit triple 9nn has the function of an escape sequence from IPA-symbol mode into procedures definable for special applications (e.g., Roman, Greek, Cyrillic orthographies, “Comment” mode, etc.).

Niuean (ISO 639-3 code niu) is a Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue, with an additional population of speakers living in New Zealand. Figure 1 indicates where Niue is located with respect to other neighboring islands in the South Pacific. The 2011 Niue Census of Populations and Households cited the number of individuals who had either basic or fluent spoken abilities at 1121 (with 101 non-speakers) (Statistics Niue 2012). English is the second most widely used language on the island. The 2013 New Zealand census cited 4548 individuals living in New Zealand who listed Niuean as one of their languages (Statistics New Zealand 2013). Niuean is classified as ‘definitely endangered’ by UNESCO (Moseley 2010). There are historically two distinct dialects: the older Motu dialect from the northern area, and the more recent Tafiti from the southern area. These dialect differences were once reflected in slight phonological differences in vocabulary items, but the differences have since eroded in the modern language (see McEwen 1970: ix). Previous research on Niuean phonetics and phonology includes a brief outline in Seiter (1980: x), two dictionaries (McEwen 1970, Sperlich 1997), and an article on vowel length (Rolle & Starks 2014). While these works provide an overview of some of the phenomena to be addressed below, this sketch attempts a more thorough documentation of the phonetic structures of Niuean, and provides novel acoustic and articulatory data from the language. Recordings accompanying this paper are of a male speaker (Mr. Krypton Okesene) and a female speaker (the second author).

Khuzestani Arabic (ISO 639-3) is a minority language spoken in the southern west of Iran, in Khuzestan province (see Figure 1). The majority of its speakers live in Ahwaz, Howeyzeh, Bostan, Susangerd, Shush, Abadan, Khorramshahr, Shadegan, Hamidiyeh (Balawi & Khezri 2014: 107), Karun, and Bawi. According to Blanc (1964: 6), this variety of Arabic is closely related to the Gelet subgroup of Mesopotamian dialects.1 This dialect is in contact with Bakhtiyari Lori and Persian (Iranian languages of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European language family), as well as Iraqi Arabic. The lexis of the dialect predominantly contains Arabic words, but it also has several Persian, English, French, and Turkish loanwords.

The paper presents a production experiment investigating the phonetic parameters speakers employ to differentiate Yes–No questions from string-identical statements in Akan, a West-African two-tone Kwa language. Results show that, in comparison to the statement, speakers use a higher pitch register throughout the utterance as a global parameter, and falling f0, longer duration and higher intensity as local parameters on the final syllable of the Yes–No question. Further, two perception experiments (forced-choice identification and gating) investigate the perceptual relevance of the global parameter and the local final parameters. Results show that listeners cannot assess the higher pitch register information to identify the mode of a sentence early on. Rather, identification takes place when the local phonetic parameters on the final vowel are available. The findings point to the superiority of language-specific cues in sentence mode perception. It is suggested that Akan uses a low boundary tone that associates with the right edge of the intonation phrase (L%) in Yes–No questions. The results are discussed from the point of view of question intonation typology in African languages. It is argued that a classification along the lines of functionally relevant cues is preferable to an impressionistic analysis.

This paper presents a pilot study of the acoustic correlates of the Plains Cree vowel system. Naturalistic recordings of speakers of mid-20th-century Plains Cree, including one monolingual speaker, provide an empirical test for the general expectations from phonological descriptions. The results demonstrate that, while the hypothesized short/long vowel pairs do indeed have a strong durational contrast, the majority of vowel pairs are also distinguished by their formants. In all cases, the long vowel occupies a more extreme position in the vowel space. Plains Cree thus appears to show both a quantity and a quality contrast in its vowel pairs. The individual speaker data are then normalized to test whether there is intra-speaker variation in these results, with the results showing variation in the relation between vowels in all three parts of the vowel space.

For some time now it has been clear that the International Phonetic Alphabet consonant chart needs to be carefully re-examined, with a view to its intended provision and possible revision. This article appears as part of the current drive (see also Ladefoged (1987a)) to solicit suggestions for the improvement or revision of the chart, from all the manifold users of the IPA alphabet. The focus here is on the consonant chart, for while the representation of vowels has always been more problematic, the theoretical issues are of a different order and should be discussed separately.

I have to confess to being to a degree pained at having it seems touched a nerve of my good friend Julian Pring's in my comments on linking /r/. He suggests that my article on the subject in its zeal to counter long-current false notions of the facts of usage has not escaped some degree of tendentiousness. I should be less than candid if I failed to grant that he has something of a point to make but equally if I let my high regard for him make me withhold the counter-comment that his criticisms strike me as by no means more successful than I was in avoiding tendentiousness in that article. I am at least glad to see that it is only on the sociological status of the so-called ‘intrusive’ /r/ that we are in disagreement.

1. In Lodge (1966), the data presented for the dialect of Stockport, Cheshire, did not show up the possible contrastive opposition in the vowels mentioned by Wells (1970: 238; in Wells' transcription, /e/: /ε̌/). It concerns the reflexes of ME ā, as in name, and ME e + gh (= voiceless palatal or velar fricative), as in eight, which have fallen together in RP. In the North of England, however, including part of the N.W. Midlands, the retension of [ç] and [x] longer than elsewhere in the country has caused differences in phoneme allocation and distribution. In the light of further evidence from Stockport and further experience of dialectal reflexes of Middle English, it seemed worthwhile re-assessing the phonemic interpretation of the Stockport data and comparing a few features of the phonology with older forms of speech from around the same area. We shall restrict our attention mainly to the vowel systems, with particular reference to the distinction mentioned above.

Like many vocalic variables which have been described for other varieties of English, Durham (eː) is correlated with a range of factors, some linguistic, others non-linguistic; in this paper, some of these correlations are presented, (eː) is one of three ‘long’ or ‘tense’ vowels which are variably realized as pure monophthongs or as opening or centring diphthongs; it is represented by words of the lexical set gate, wait, day, etc. The other two vowels are (oː), which occurs in words such as bone, goat and toe, and (ɔː), which occurs in torn, shore, etc., and variably in such items as law, walk and all (in which it alternates with /ɑː/). These three vowels probably show rather similar patterns of variation; however, in this study only (eː) will be considered.