This paper reports on the use of nasalized post-alveolar clicks in a special version of a Chinese nursery rhyme, used in two different so-called dialect areas in China. In one, initial velar nasals are replaced with the clicks, while in Mandarin the nasalized clicks are inserted at the beginning of words with zero initials.

The set of vowel symbols introduced by Gimson in 1977 into the Jones English Pronouncing Dictionary for the representation of British pronunciation became so widely used that for two decades an unprecedented harmony reigned and an ever wider non-specialist audience became accustomed to accept that pronunciations should be presented to them via the International Phonetic Alphabet in this form. This unity was disrupted by the publication by one branch of the Oxford University Press of important reference books in which one in four of the Gimson twenty vowel-phoneme symbols were changed. The grounds for welcoming or deprecating each of these changes are discussed.

Gaza City, with a population of over half a million residents, is the largest urban center and de-facto capital of the Gaza Strip, which itself has a total population of over 1.8 million. As of 2018, it is estimated that at least 1.3 million of the residents of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees from other areas in historic Palestine, having fled to Gaza after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. These refugee communities originally come from the many historic rural areas that surrounded the Gaza Strip, smaller towns and cities along the Mediterranean coast, as well as areas further afield such as Jaffa, 69 km north of Gaza on the coast, and Bir il-Sab‘, the largest city in the Nagab desert region (see Figure 1). Linguistically, many of these refugee communities are of Palestinian Arabic dialect backgrounds, although varieties of Arabic spoken in the Nagab are classified as originating in the Hijaz area of what is today Saudi Arabia (see Shahin 2007 on Palestinian Arabic and Henkin 2010 on Nagab Arabic).

This research began out of two overlapping motives. First, we have been observing what have impressionistically been termed ‘whistling’ fricatives in Shona (and also, though not reported here, in another language, Jibbali); we felt that there was room for a fuller analysis of some aspects of their production characteristics. Second, sibilance in general offers plenty of scope for what Delattre called the ‘quest of the Holy Grail’ in phonetics: the search for features of relevance to perception. More background to both the production and the perception issues will be given as we proceed.

Ika is a dialect of the Igbo language spoken in Ika South and Ika North East Local Government Areas of Delta State and the Igbanke area of Edo State in Nigeria. It belongs to the Niger Igbo cluster of dialects (Ikekeonwu 1986) spoken in areas bordering the west of the River Niger; Nwaozuzu (2008) refers to these dialects as West Niger Group of Dialects. A word list of Ika, written by Williamson (1968), was one of the earliest works on Ika and she points out in that work that Ika (and Ukwuani), though regarded as dialects of Igbo, are treated as separate on purely linguistic grounds. Ika phonology differs from that of Standard Igbo and other Igbo dialects and this is why the study of Ika has been of major interest to Igbo linguists in recent years. There have been moves to grant Ika a language status, as seen in the assignment of a unique reference code to Ika: the ISO language code for Ika is ISO 639–3 ikk while that for Igbo is ISO 639–3 ibo. Standard Igbo has the same consonants as Ika though the latter has two consonants, /ʃ/and/ʒ/, which do not exist in the Standard dialect. However, the vocalic system of Ika is largely different from that of Standard and some Igbo dialects which have eight vowels. Ika has a nine-vowel system which includes the schwa, which is a variant of some vowels. Furthermore, it has nine nasal vowels; Standard Igbo and other dialects of Igbo have no nasal vowels. Ika manifests intonation in addition to lexical tone. Standard Igbo and other Igbo dialects do not manifest intonation in the same way as Ika does; that is, they do not express attitudes and emotions through intonation. They manifest only lexical tone. In an earlier study of Northern Igbo dialects, Ikekeonwu (1986) could only discover the existence of upstep in Abakaliki dialect. Okorji (1991) and Egbeji (1999) have studied the intonation of Umuchu, an inland West dialect of Igbo. Their findings, particularly Egbeji’s, show that a declarative sentence can be changed to an interrogative one (repetitive question) by use of intonation. This is a syntactic function which can also be likened to what happens in Standard and most other Igbo dialects where the tone of the pronominal subject changes from high to low in the indication of interrogation. At present, therefore, there appears to be no evidence that attitudes and emotions can be expressed through intonation in Umuchu and other Igbo dialects as is observed in Ika.

Sasak is a Malayo-Sumbawan (Adelaar 2005) language spoken as a primary language in Lombok, Indonesia (see the map in Figure 1). It is estimated to be spoken by 2 million (Clynes 1995) or 2.5 million (Marli 2015) people. Sasak is reported to have four (Jacq 1998) or five (Austin 2003) major dialects, to which Austin (2003) gives informal names based on the pronunciation of the deictic words for ‘like this’ and ‘like that’: Ngenó-Ngené (central northeast, central east, and central west coasts of Lombok), Menó-Mené (central Lombok), Ngotó-Ngeté (northeastern Lombok), Ngenó-Mené, also known as Kutó-Kuté (north Lombok), and Meriaq-Meriku (south central Lombok). The dialects with the broadest geographical distribution are Menó-Mené and Ngenó-Ngené.

The merger of post-alveolar /ʃ/ and palatal /ç/ into alveolopalatal /ɕ/ has recently gained growing interest in sociophonetic research, especially in the Middle German dialect area. In Luxembourgish, a Continental West Germanic language, the sound change has been linked to age differences, while its origins remain unclear. Two studies with a regional focus are presented in this paper. The first study examines the merger in the Centre and the South of Luxembourg. The acoustic examination of both the spectral peak and the centre of gravity of a spoken data set of five minimal pairs embedded in read and orally translated sentences from 48 speakers (three generations (old generation, 65–91 years; middle generation, 40–64 years; young generation, 20–39 years; each generation, n = 16), men and women) reveals interesting results related to their regional background. In the old generation, the merger is further advanced in the speech of old men from the former mining region in the South compared to their peers in the Centre, the former leading this sound change. On the other hand, young speakers in both regions produce only alveolopalatal /ɕ/, the merger being complete in this generation. The second study presents exploratory data from the East and the North of the country. The analysis of this smaller sample (n = 6 speakers) reveals patterns similar to the central region. Pointing to language contact with Romance in the South as cradle and/or catalyser of the merger, these results not only give further clues as to the development in Luxembourg, but also add to a deeper understanding of sound changes in process in complex sibilant systems.

The question of whether and how intonation patterns bear meanings is an old one, usually evaluated with reference to imagined or elicited speech. This study takes an interactional linguistic approach instead, examining intonation and meaning in naturally occurring interaction. The pattern considered here is a French intonation contour involving a salient initial accent and a low primary accent. This intonation pattern could be analysed as the so-called accent d'insistance, which is often said to have pragmatic meanings such as intensification and contrastive focus. This article analyses the uses of this contour in repeats. When used in repeats of an interlocutor's speech, the contour indicates unproblematic receipt of the repeated talk, making a confirming response optional, and contrasts with a final rise pattern used in repeats that initiate repair and request confirmation. However, in two other types of repetitions (self-repetition of a previously made assessment, and modified self-repetition for correction purposes), there is indeed interactional evidence supporting the argument that the contour helps convey the pragmatic meanings intensification and contrastive focus, respectively. It is argued that all of these meanings are achieved through the interplay of semiotic resources of several kinds (prosodic, verbal and sequential properties of talk), and that the contour itself has no inherent, context-independent meaning. The empirical findings presented suggest that the autonomy of intonation in the achievement of meaning has been overemphasised.

Lisu (ISO 639-2 lis) is spoken by just over a million members of the group of this name in south-western China, north-eastern Burma, northern Thailand and north-eastern India. It formerly also had other names used by outsiders, including Yeren (Chinese yeren ‘wild people’), and Yawyin in Burma and Yobin in India (both derived from the Chinese term). Other names included Lisaw from the Shan and Thai name for the group, also seen in the former Burmese name Lishaw. About two-thirds of the speakers live in China, especially in north-western Yunnan Province, but also scattered elsewhere in Yunnan and Sichuan. About a quarter live in the Kachin State and the northern Shan State in Burma, with a substantial number in Chiangmai, Chiangrai and other provinces of Thailand, and a few thousand in Arunachal Pradesh in India. It is also spoken as a second language by many speakers of Nusu, Anung, Rawang and others in north-western Yunnan and northern Burma. Lisu has almost completely replaced Anung in China and is replacing Lemei in China. The Lisu are one of the 55 national minorities recognised in China, one of 135 ethnic groups recognised in Burma, a scheduled (officially listed and recognised) tribe in India, and one of the recognised hill tribe groups of Thailand. Figure 1 shows a map of the area where Lisu is spoken.

Approximants that can be considered weaker versions of voiced fricatives (termed here ‘frictionless continuants’) are poorly served by the IPA in terms of symbolization as compared to semi-vowel approximants. In this paper we survey the central approximants and the symbols and diacritics used to transcribe them; we focus on evidence for the use of non-rhotic frictionless continuants in both natural language (by which we mean non-clinical varieties) and disordered speech; and we suggest some possible unitary symbols for those that currently require the use of a hard-to-read lowering diacritic beneath the symbol for the corresponding voiced fricative.

In this journal a number of suggestions have recently been made as to possible improvements to the Association's alphabet. Some of these proposals are relatively minor, involving only the addition of symbols or diacritics; the acceptance of these would have little or no effect on the basic character of the alphabet. But others, specifically those relating to the re-organization of the Cardinal Vowels and the consonant chart, are more thorough-going. Here, important principles are involved which would seem to demand more discussion. The following remarks are intended as a contribution to this discussion rather than as an evaluation of specific proposals.

Chengdu speech is the received pronunciation among the various Sichuan dialects spoken by ten million people in Southwest China. In this short paper, I intend to discuss the characteristics of the initials of Chengdu speech as compared with Standard Chinese. The following abbreviations and conventions are used: CDH = Chengduhua, i.e. Chengdu speech of Chinese. PTH = Putonghua, Standard Chinese based on Beijing pronunciation. CPA = the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet. Chinese characters are transliterated into CPA first when they are cited as examples. A phonetic transcription of CDH pronunciation follows, in square brackets. Tone symbols are placed before the CDH syllable: [̄] High Level, [̖] Low Falling, [̀] High Falling, [̬] Fall-rise. For PTH the tone symbol is placed above the CPA nuclear vowel letter e.g. mā High Level, má High Rising, mǎ Fall-rise, mà High Falling.

Having followed with interest the recent exchange between Jack Windsor Lewis (JWL) and Julian Pring (JP) on the status of ‘linking’ and ‘intrusive’ /r/ and its place in teaching, I am prompted to intervene by the belief that a relevant and important point has been missed which also has wider implications for language teaching in general.

A fundamentally important practice in phonetics is the analysis of continuous speech into a sequence of discrete segments. There has been considerable debate about the theoretical validity of this practice within classical auditory/kinaesthetic phonetics and in phonology as well as in the context of the acoustic analysis of speech; in recent years the issue has become more widely important as research work in automatic speech processing has resulted in computer algorithms for segmenting speech and assigning phonetic labels to the segments. Work on the automatic segmentation and labeling of speech sounds has been carried on in our department since 1980. This paper begins by examining the theoretical issues involved in segmentation and labeling, then describes our own work.

Although Hindi is a major world-language, with well over a hundred million speakers, the description of its prosodic features has been neglected. Like most other present-day Indo-European languages, it is a non-tone language, with sentence intonation and a stress accent. Stress occurs on syllables within words (word-stress) and on words within sentences (sentence-stress). By confining ourselves in the first instance to single-word utterances we may formulate some rules for word-stress, as a preliminary to a discussion of sentence-stress and intonation.

Chinese languages have a set of segments known as apical vowels, which have been analysed in previous studies as either genuine vowels, fricative vowels, fricative consonants, or approximants. This study is concerned with the apical vowel attested in Jixi-Hui Chinese. We examine this segment from acoustic and articulatory perspectives and argue that it is best defined as a fricative /z/. Phonologically, Jixi-Hui Chinese /z/ is a distinct phoneme that is exclusively attested in syllable nucleus position where it constitutes a tone-bearing unit and which can undergo tonal sandhi processes. It can appear not only after coronal sibilants /s ts tsʰ/, but also after bilabials /p pʰ/ and nasals /m n/. Acoustically, we show that this segment contains frication noise in its initial phase in the majority of cases, with a formant structure towards its end. The analysis of the zero-crossing rate confirms this significant presence of noise, clearly distinguishing this segment from genuine vowels. Furthermore, articulatory analyses of ultrasound data show that /z/ has a near-identical tongue shape to fricative /s/ on both mid-sagittal and coronal planes, in both sibilant and non-sibilant contexts. These findings are viewed in light of the variability in the way /z/ is phonetically implemented in Jixi-Hui Chinese.

This study examined native language (L1) transfer effects on the production of second-language (L2) prosody by intermediate Greek learners of English, specifically the set of tonal events and their alignment, speech rate, pitch span and pitch level in English polar questions. Greek uses an L* L+H- L% melody giving rise to a low–high–low f0 contour at the end of the polar question that does not resemble any of the contours used by native speakers in English polar questions. The results showed that the Greek speakers transferred the full set of Greek tonal events into English associating them with stressed syllables, and consistently placed the focus on the verb. The Greek speakers also anchored the peak of the phrase accent in polar questions around the midpoint of the stressed vowel across L1/L2 despite using longer vowel durations in L2. At the same time, their productions deviated from L1 forms in terms of speech rate (slower in L2), pitch span (narrower in L2) and pitch level (lower in L2), indicating that even when learners adopt an L1 prosodic feature in their L2, they still produce interlanguage forms that deviate from L1.

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).

As part of the preparation for the meeting on the revision of the International Phonetic Alphabet, I have been asked to write a short summary of my correspondence with a number of members of the Association on the principles on which the alphabet should be based. To this end, I have sought the views of the 34 respondents who gave first or second rank to this topic on the preregistration form for the 1989 Convention.