Liverpool English (LE) is the variety of English spoken in Liverpool and much of the surrounding county of Merseyside, in the north-west of England. After London, the north-west of England is the most densely populated of all regions in England and Wales, with the population of Liverpool standing at around 450,000. LE itself is said to have developed in the middle of the 19th century, after rapid immigration from Ireland during the Irish potato famines of 1845–1847 (see Knowles 1973). Arguably as a result of this immigration, as we will see, there are some similarities between LE's phonological system and those of Irish Englishes. Of course, as we might expect, the phonological system of LE maintains its connection with other northern Englishes, too.

Among the numerous factors known or suspected to affect the length of a syllable in English is the nature of the immediately following syllable. It is widely recognized (P. Fijn van Draat, 1910, p. 14; Jones, 1956, §§ 886–7; Bolinger, 1965, pp. 168–9; Lehiste, 1972, p. 2021) that in a succession of monosyllabic words a word containing a full vowel will be longer when followed by another such word than when followed by a word containing a reduced vowel.1 Van Draat's example is Money makes the mare to go versus Money makes the mare go: in the latter, ‘We pronounce mare in two syllables.’ In the former one can say that the reduced to ‘borrows time’ from the full mare.

This paper presents findings on the articulatory and prosodic conditioning of Italian (lexical and post-lexical) geminate and non-geminate consonants. Phonetic and phonological prominence interact, resulting in a durational contrast which is not uniformly robust. So-called ‘inherent’ geminates are also found to be long post-consonantally, contrary to received wisdom, and do not form ‘supergeminates’ in conditions of postlexical gemination. Formant analysis of laterals reveals possible non-durational properties of gemination, with evidence for a more palatalised tongue configuration in geminates. Implications for the structural status of gemination are discussed.

Modem Greek is a descendant of Classical Greek and is spoken today by approximately 11,000,000 people living in Greece. In addition, it is spoken (with various modifications) in large Greek immigrant communities in North America, Australia and elsewhere. Although the Modern Greek dialects had largely been shaped by the 10th c. A.D. (Browning 1983), the linguistic situation in Greece has been one of diglossia from the middle 19th c. (the early beginnings of the independent Greek state) and until 1976. The High and Low varieties of Greek diglossia are known as Katharevousa and Dhimotiki respectively. Katharevousa was a purist, partly invented, variety that was heavily influenced by Classical Greek; the term Dhimotiki, on the other hand, loosely describes the mother tongue of the Greeks, which was confined to oral communication. In 1976 the use of Katharevousa was officially abolished and gradually a new standard based on Dhimotiki as spoken in Athens has emerged. This variety is adopted by an increasingly large number of educated speakers all over Greece, who choose it over regional varieties (Mackridge 1985). In spelling, Modern Greek has kept many of the conventions of Ancient Greek, although several simplifications have taken place since 1976. Perhaps the most dramatic of these has been the decision to stop using accent and breath marks (which have not had phonetic correspondents in the language for nearly 2,000 years); these marks were replaced by one accent on the stressed vowel of each word with two or more syllables. The variety described here is Standard Modern Greek as spoken by Athenians. The sample text in particular is based on recordings of two Athenian speakers, a male in his mid-twenties and a female in her mid-thirties. Both speakers read the passage twice in relatively informal style.

This paper analyses clicks in naturally-occurring English conversation. It demonstrates that regardless of any paralinguistic functions clicks may undertake, their occurrence is orderly and systematic, and intimately tied to the interactional structure of talk. Specifically, clicks are shown to function alongside the phonetic parameters of pitch, articulatory segmental features and voice quality (and the sequential and lexical organisation of talk) to demarcate the onset of new and disjunctive sequences. The methodology employed combines (i) the sequential analysis techniques of Conversation Analysis with (ii) parametric impressionistic and instrumental phonetic investigations. A key feature of this methodology is the study of naturally-occurring conversation rather than intuited or laboratory speech data. The findings in this paper challenge the traditional view that clicks function only paralinguistically in English. They also highlight the fruitfulness of implementing phonetic investigations alongside interactional analyses since such an approach enables previously unobserved patterns in the phonetics-interaction interface to be identified.

Recent laryngoscopic observations suggest that renewed discussion of pharyngeal articulations is warranted. The discussion involves issues of place of articulation — the nature of the category “epiglottal” — and of manner of articulation — whether pharyngeal manners of articulation go beyond approximant and fricative to include trill and stop. In essence, the question is still the old one of how those sounds which are labelled auditorily as “pharyngeal” are produced. The observations reported here suggest that “epiglottal” articulations can be treated as a category of pharyngeal manners of articulation; and that manners of pharyngeal articulation are more closely parallel to uvular manners of articulation than previously assumed. The nature of pharyngeal approximants and pharyngeal fricatives is reexamined, evidence of trilling accompanying friction is presented, and the nature of the pharyngeal (epiglottal) stop is described. It is suggested that all four of these categories share a common place of articulation, and that they can best be described as differing in manner of articulation. The motivation for elaborating the phonetic detail of these distinctions is to facilitate a more precise description of phonemes that have been identified as pharyngeal in the languages of the world, and to provide a clearer explanation of phonetic and phonological processes that may be related to pharyngeal articulations.

The aim of this paper is to show that the approximant feature refers to a phonetic class which includes other subcategories of sounds, such as semi-vowels, rhotics, laterals and a subset of consonants. The consonants – due to the lack of articulatory precision – keep neither the obligatory closure for stops nor the aerodynamic characteristics required to produce a turbulent airstream, as is characteristic of fricatives. I am referring to these sounds as [[Voiced bilabial fricative] [Voiced dental fricative] [Voiced palatal fricative] [Voiced velar fricative]]. Moreover, I suggest a new definition of the approximant feature, which points out that the outflow of non-turbulent airstream is caused by either the opening of the organs or the lack of articulatory precision, or even both phenomena together.

From 18 to 21 August 1989 approximately 120 members of the Association (and a few guests) met in Kiel, West Germany, to work on revisions of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). There had been a great deal of preparation for this convention, involving the soliciting of opinion by mail on a wide range of topics, and considerable research on the present status of the IPA. A previous issue of this journal, JIPA 18(2), collected a number of these preparatory opinions. At the convention itself there were five major working groups which met almost continuously for the first two days. Three groups considered consonants, vowels and suprasegmentals; the other two considered computational aspects of the IPA, and the needs of speech pathologists and others for extensions of the IPA. In addition there were groups concerned with the principles on which the IPA should be based, the form of presentation of the IPA, past successes and failures, and methods of illustration of the IPA. The groups reported back to the whole at intervals, and on the last day the convention met in a series of plenary sessions to consider and vote on the final working reports. The following is a compilation of six of the group reports reflecting the results of the discussions and votes of the plenary sessions. The Association is very grateful to the co-ordinators and co-chairs of the groups. Most of the wording below is taken directly from their reports; in accordance with the traditions of the Association, this report is presented without attribution to particular authors.

The present study sets out to investigate variation due to gender, F0, and/or prosodic position in Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec (Oto-Manguean), a language with phonemically breathy, modal and creaky vowels, each associated with a tone. Male and female speakers produced words in five prosodic positions: isolation (with focus, F0 higher than sentence-medial position), initial (focused, high F0), isolation (without focus, mid-range F0), medial (mid-range F0), final (lower F0). Two acoustic measures of phonation, H1-H2 and H1-A3, were made for each vowel. Results were inconclusive as to whether one gender was creakier or breathier than the other, though they did suggest that there was a difference in the production of phonation. In addition, there was also a strong effect of F0 on phonation, but not of position independently of F0. While the three-way phonation contrast was present in all five prosodic positions, it was not always well-defined. The contrast was minimized in isolation with focus (high F0) and initial position (high F0). The results obtained indicate that there is variation in phonation, even in a language with contrastive phonation.

Dutch is a language spoken by about 20 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium. This region is not only characterised by a complex dialect situation, but also by the use of two institutionalised varieties of the Standard language: Netherlandic Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and is documented in Collins & Mees (1982), Mees & Collins (1983) and Gussenhoven (1999), while Belgian Dutch is spoken in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) by approximately 6 million speakers. This variety is the same as what is commonly referred to internationally as ‘Flemish’. However, the term ‘Flemish’ is avoided here since it erroneously suggests that this language is different from the one spoken in the Netherlands: the lexical and syntactic differences between the two language varieties are very small. Nevertheless, there are significant phonetic differences as well as substantial regional variability within the two speech communities.

Central Arrernte is the language of an area centred on the present-day town of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It is one of a group of dialects or closely-related languages spoken or formerly spoken over most of the southeast quarter of the Northern Territory and extending on the east side into the far-western part of Queensland; a slightly less closely-related language extends south into the north-central part of South Australia. They include varieties using the names Anmatyerr, Alyawarr and Antekerrepenh as well as several varieties using the name Arrernte with (nowadays) English geographical qualifiers. The major surviving varieties, Eastern, Central and Western Arrernte, Eastern and Western Anmatyerr, Southern and Northern Alyawarr each have several hundred to a thousand speakers, and are still being learned by many of the children, who grow up bilingual (in English) or multilingual. Breen (2001) is a brief introduction to the phonology of these languages.

The present study examines evidence for change in real time within the short vowel subsystem of the RP accent of English over the course of the twentieth century. It compares plots of average formant positions for the short vowels, stemming from several data corpora. It furthermore describes a change over time in the juxtaposition of the trap and strut vowels as captured in the calculated angle and distance between the two, using trap as a fixed point. This representation of a relationship in a single measurement by means of angle calculation is a methodological innovation for the sociophonetic enterprise. A value specifying the geometric relationship between two vowel positions is precise and replicable, as well as abstract enough to be comparable across data sets. Differences between ‘phonetic’ and ‘sociolinguistic’ stances on the interpretation of acoustic vowel data in formant plots and the issue of suitable vowel normalisation procedures for sociophonetics will also be discussed.

In this work, Mandarin tone production is examined using simultaneous laryngoscopy and laryngeal ultrasound (SLLUS). Laryngoscopy is used to obtain information about laryngeal state, and laryngeal ultrasound is used to quantify changes in larynx height. With this methodology, several observations are made concerning the production of Mandarin tone in citation form. Two production strategies are attested for low tone production: (i) larynx lowering and (ii) larynx raising with laryngeal constriction. Another finding is that the larynx rises continually during level tone production, which is interpreted as a means to compensate for declining subglottal pressure. In general, we argue that larynx height plays a supportive role in facilitating f0 change under circumstances where intrinsic mechanisms for f0 control are insufficient to reach tonal targets due to vocal fold inertia. Activation of the laryngeal constrictor can be used to achieve low tone targets through mechanical adjustment to vocal fold dynamics. We conclude that extra-glottal laryngeal mechanisms play important roles in facilitating the production of tone targets and should be integrated into the contemporary articulatory model of tone production.

Indonesian is an Austronesian language, closely related to Malay. Malay served as a lingua franca throughout the Malay Archipelago for centuries, and a variant of Malay was adopted as the official language of Indonesia when independence was declared in 1945. The variety described here is sometimes referred to as Standard Indonesian. Its autoglossonym is ‘Bahasa Indonesia’.

This article reports a study of acoustic phonetic variation between ethnic groups in the realisation of the British English liquids /l/ and /ɹ/. Data are presented from ‘Anglo’ and ‘Asian’ native speakers of Sheffield English. Sheffield Anglo English is typically described as having ‘dark’ /l/, but there is some disagreement in the literature. British Asian speakers, on the other hand, are often described as producing much ‘clearer’ realisations of /l/, but the specific differences between varieties may vary by geographical location. Regression analysis of liquid steady states and Smoothing Spline ANOVAs of vocalic–liquid formant trajectories show consistent F2−F1 differences in /l/ between Anglo and Asian speakers in non-final contexts, which is suggestive of a strong distinction between varieties in terms of clearness/darkness. There is also evidence of a polarity effect in liquids, with differing relationships between liquid phonemes in each variety: Asian speakers produce /l/ with higher F2−F1 values than /ɹ/, and Anglo speakers produce /ɹ/ with higher F2−F1 values than /l/. The results are discussed in terms of phonetic variation in liquids and socioindexical factors in speech production.

This paper looks at the phenomenon of ingressive speech, i.e. speech produced on a pulmonic ingressive airstream, set in the context of human and animal ingressive phonation. The literature on ingressive speech and phonation spanning several centuries is reviewed, as well as contemporary reports of their incidence and characteristics from both functional and acoustic perspectives. Ingressive phonation has been used as a deliberate means of speech or sound production for hundreds of years in order to achieve specific effects, and it is still used for the same purposes, by e.g. shamans and ventriloquists. In normal spoken conversation – contrary to what is often claimed – present-day ingressive speech is not limited to Scandinavia or Nordic languages, but is found on all continents, in genetically unrelated languages. Where ingressive speech occurs, it serves more or less the same paralinguistic functions, such as a feedback marker in a dialog. Since pulmonic ingressive phonation is also common in the calls of monkeys and apes, thus exhibiting a biological basis, it is suggested that ingressive speech might constitute a neglected universal phenomenon, rather than being highly marked, which is how it is commonly described in the literature.

The following description of French is based on the speech of a young Parisian female speaker. Varieties of French have almost identical inventories; the main differences are to be found in the maintenance or loss of certain contrasts.

Recent phonological approaches incorporate phonetic principles in the motivation of phonological regularities, e.g. vowel reduction and neutralization in unstressed position by target undershoot. So far, evidence for this hypothesis is based on impressionistic and acoustic data but not on articulatory data. The major goal of this study is to compare formant spaces and lingual positions during the production of German vowels for combined effects of stress, accent and corrective contrast. In order to identify strategies for vowel reduction independent of speaker-specific vocal-tract anatomies and individual biomechanical properties, an approach similar to the Generalized Procrustes Analysis was applied to formant spaces and lingual vowel target positions. The data basis consists of the German stressed and unstressed full vowels /iù ɪ yù ʏ eù ɛ ɛù φù œ aù a où ɔ uù ʊ/ from seven speakers recorded by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulography (EMMA). Speaker normalized articulatory and formant spaces gave evidence for a greater degree of coarticulation with the consonant context for unstressed vowels as compared to stressed vowels. However, only for tense vowels could spatial reduction patterns be attributed to vowel shortening, whereas lax vowels were reduced without shortening. The results are discussed in the light of current theories of vowel reduction, i.e. target undershoot, Adaptive Dispersion Theory and Prominence Alignment.

Italian is spoken in Italy, in parts of Switzerland and Croatia, and in diaspora communities across the world. The standard language as spoken in Italy has three main regional varieties: Northern, Central and Southern. But contemporary ‘mainstream Italian’ – not following the standard in all respects – appears to be a variety under construction by speakers wishing to give themselves a national appeal, a process driven by the media and by workplace mobility. Our speaker is representative of this group. She is a woman in her thirties who was brought up in a middle-class household in Rome, and has travelled extensively in Italy and abroad. She aims at a cultivated accent with no strong regional features, sometimes called a ‘RAI’ accent (RAI /rai/ is the national broadcaster). The style she uses is a somewhat coloured ‘storytelling’ style.