Shawi1 is the language of the indigenous Shawi/Chayahuita people in Northwestern Amazonia, Peru. It belongs to the Kawapanan language family, together with its moribund sister language, Shiwilu. It is spoken by about 21,000 speakers (see Rojas-Berscia 2013) in the provinces of Alto Amazonas and Datem del Marañón in the region of Loreto and in the northern part of the region of San Martín, being one of the most vital languages in the country (see Figure 1).2 Although Shawi groups in the Upper Amazon were contacted by Jesuit missionaries during colonial times, the maintenance of their customs and language is striking. To date, most Shawi children are monolingual and have their first contact with Spanish at school. Yet, due to globalisation and the construction of highways by the Peruvian government, many Shawi villages are progressively westernising. This may result in the imminent loss of their indigenous culture and language.

This work asks how the syllable as a unit is delimited in space and time. To do this we bring together two theoretical approaches to the syllable: a sonority-based approach which emphasizes spatial organization, and the coupled oscillator model (Nam, Goldstein & Saltzman 2009) which emphasizes temporal organization. Many languages present challenges to these theories, and here we focus on Georgian, which is problematic for both approaches, as Georgian permits onset clusters of up to seven consonants and of any sonority shape. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between gestural overlap and sonority shape in Georgian via electromagnetic articulography. Drawing on data from three speakers, we examine gestural overlap in two-consonant onsets that vary in sonority shape and order of place of articulation. Using two measures of gestural overlap, we find (i) long lag between consonant gestures, which we suggest is language-specific and (ii) that lag is largest in sonority rises and smallest in sonority falls. These results suggest that neither phonemic recoverability nor a hierarchical effect of increasingly open constrictions is the primary motivator behind inter-consonantal timing. Instead, the high degree of overlap in sonority falls ensures their tautosyllabic parse, which would otherwise be threatened by intrusive vocoids. Thus, we argue that recoverability of the syllable as a unit is the major motivating factor behind the timing patterns observed, and that syllables emerge not solely from either spatial or temporal properties, but from the interplay of the two.

Acoustic studies have shown that in Australian English (AusE), vowel length contrasts are realised through temporal, spectral and dynamic characteristics. However, relatively little is known about the articulatory differences between long and short vowels in this variety. This study investigates the articulatory properties of three long–short vowel pairs in AusE: /iː–ɪ/ beat – bit, /ɐː–ɐ/ cart – cut and /oː–ɔ/ port – pot, using electromagnetic articulography. Our findings show that short vowel gestures had shorter durations and more centralised articulatory targets than their long equivalents. Short vowel gestures also had proportionately shorter periods of articulatory stability and proportionately longer articulatory transitions to following consonants than long vowels. Long–short vowel pairs varied in the relationship between their acoustic duration and the similarity of their articulatory targets: /iː–ɪ/ had more similar acoustic durations and less similar articulatory targets, while /ɐː–ɐ/ were distinguished by greater differences in acoustic duration and more similar articulatory targets. These data suggest that the articulation of vowel length contrasts in AusE may be realised through a complex interaction of temporal, spatial and dynamic kinematic cues.

This paper looks at the use of /r/-sandhi in the speech of Queen Elizabeth II. Potential contexts of /r/-sandhi were identified and analysed for the presence or absence of rhoticity and glottalisation in a corpus of Christmas speeches over a period of seven decades. The results show that the Queen avoids intrusive /r/ altogether but that she uses linking /r/ in most potential cases, that glottalisation is common when /r/-sandhi is not used, and that linking /r/ and glottalisation can also co-occur. A comparison with a longitudinal corpus of speakers also shows that the Queen resembles group-level trends in the case of linking /r/ but differs in the case of intrusive /r/. The results also indicate that a number of phonetic and usage-based variables influence linking /r/ usage, including previously unreported factors such as vowel quality collocation frequency. The findings are discussed in the context of usage-based theory.

This paper focuses on the spectral properties of anterior sibilant fricatives in Northern Peninsular Spanish, and sibilant-merging and non-merging varieties of Basque. Non-merging varieties of Basque have two voiceless anterior sibilant fricatives, characterized as apico-alveolar and lamino-alveolar. In other Basque varieties, however, these two phonemes have merged with varying results. Twenty-four participants divided into four different groups have been studied. One group is a set of monolingual Spanish speakers from north-central Spain, while the remaining three are Basque–Spanish bilingual groups with different sibilant fricative systems in Basque. The goal is to describe the spectral properties of anterior sibilant fricatives and examine the effect of the L1-Basque sibilant system upon L2-Spanish. The Basque varieties chosen are: (i) Azpeitia Basque, where merging in favor of the lamino-alveolar sibilant fricative has occurred; (ii) Lemoa Basque, where the merging in favor of the apico-alveolar sibilant fricative is widespread; and (iii) Goizueta Basque, where no merging has happened. Participants took part in an elicitation task where they produced sentences containing target words with an intervocalic anterior sibilant fricative in Basque and Spanish. Bayesian probability was used for inferential statistics. Speakers of the non-merging Basque variety show the narrowest acoustic dispersion of /s/ in Spanish, as opposed to broader diffusion in the other three groups. Regarding L1 transfer, while the Azpeitia group does not show transfer into Spanish, the Lemoa and Goizueta groups do. Results show that /s/ is more fronted for monolingual Spanish speakers from north-central Spain than the previous literature has reported.

This study examines acoustic characteristics of a three-way distinction among a set of voiceless coronal fricatives and two sets of voiceless coronal affricates in Anong, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language. The study shows a lack of parallelism between the fricative and affricate series. The fricatives are well differentiated by spectral shapes and formant transitions of the following vowels, but not by the center of gravity. The affricates are well differentiated by the center of gravity, but not by spectral shapes nor by formant transitions of the following vowels. The study shows that /ʂ/ is acoustically a retroflex, while /tʂʰ tʂ/ are not.

In the paper ‘Do we need a symbol for a central open vowel?’, William Barry and Jürgen Trouvain unveil possible gaps in the IPA chart while positing the need for having three basic phonetic symbols for transcribing open vowels of the world's languages. The main point raised by the authors is that the phonetic quality of a in languages with a single open vowel is somewhere in between that of the open front and back vowels in more complex vowel systems. They exemplify this point by referring to the open vowel of the Spanish word gata, which is usually transcribed with the symbol [a] in spite of being more central than Cardinal Vowel 4. Several possible solutions are proposed: adding small capital A or barred a for the open central vowel to the already existing symbols [a] and [ɑ]; keeping [ɑ] for the open back vowel, moving the symbol [a] to the open central vowel position, and having either [æ] or small capital A as symbols for the open front vowel. As argued below, I do not believe that three IPA phonetic symbols are really needed for the transcription of different variants of a.

Urarina (ISO 639-3, code ura – Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016) is an Amazonian language isolate spoken in the Loreto Region of Peru. Most Urarina communities are located on the banks of the rivers Corrientes, Chambira and Urituyacu, which are tributaries of the Marañon River, which in turn is the mainstem source of the Amazon River. Figure 1 shows the map of Peru and the location of the Urarina territory.

The present study provides an acoustic description of the vowel system of Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi (Hñäñho), an endangered and understudied Oto-Manguean language variety spoken in central Mexico. The goal of this production study was to determine whether the phonemic contrasts between Hñäñho vowels, as previously described impressionistically, are maintained in the acoustic realizations of a group of relatively balanced bilingual native speakers of Hñäñho or if Hñäñho phonemic categories are merging due to the extensive influence of Spanish. To this end, each Hñäñho speaker recorded a carefully designed list of 90 Hñäñho words and the resulting dataset of a total of 1507 tokens was subjected to analysis. Linear mixed-effects models were constructed to predict Bark scale correlates of vowel height (B1 – b0) and vowel frontness/backness (B2 – B1) and the Pillai scores were calculated in order to determine the degree of overlap for adjacent Hñäñho vowel pairs. The speakers’ Hñäñho vowels were also compared to their Spanish vowels. A list of five Spanish words was used and a total of 90 tokens of the Spanish vowels were recorded. The results confirm that the vowel system of Hñäñho, produced by older Hñäñho speakers, consists of 10 distinct phonemes. Hñäñho-specific phonetic details are discussed, including the fronted realization of the vowel /u/ as [u̟] and the lowering of the vowel /ɔ/ to [ɒ], which might lead to a future /a – ɔ/ merger. These findings underline the importance of early and sustained exposure to indigenous bilinguals’ native language for the maintenance of phonetic features of Hñäñho despite extensive contact with Spanish.

Of the official languages of South Africa, Afrikaans has the widest geographical, demographic and racial distribution (Webb 2003). According to the latest South African census of 2011 (StatsSA 2012), Afrikaans as first language is spoken by 13.5% of the country's inhabitants, only surpassed in numbers by Zulu (22.7%) and Xhosa (16%). In neighbouring Namibia, 10.4% of the population has Afrikaans as their first language. A noteworthy number of recent emigrants to United Kingdom, Australia, Europe and North America are likely to be Afrikaans speakers as well.1 A handful of elderly persons in Patagonia still speak Afrikaans; they are descendants of some 600 Afrikaans speakers who settled in Patagonia at the beginning of the 20th century (Du Toit 1995, Coetzee et al. 2018).

Any attempt to define and describe a non-native pronunciation of English is beset with a variety of difficulties. In the first place the researcher is dealing with something acquired, at least in part, by a conscious effort of the speaker. Although, as I have argued elsewhere (Jenner, 1984), English has a special status in the Netherlands, approximating to that of a second language in other countries, it is nonetheless true that the average Dutch learner has no opportunity for actual productive practice of the language until he is already 10 or 12 years old. His ears may be familiar with the sounds of native English, owing to the extensive use of English in Dutch television and cinema, but they are also conditioned by a much greater exposure to Dutch. His perceptual norms are Dutch. In the case of pronunciation this implies that the learner will initially perceive the phonological features of English with reference to the systems of Dutch, and will tend to interpret them as deviant surface exponents of underlying Dutch norms.

The Eighth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Leeds, 1975) provided an opportunity, at a discussion seminar called specially for that purpose, ‘The larynx and language’, for phoneticians anxious to put phonation distinctions on a more systematic footing to appeal to specialists in the aerodynamic aspects of laryngal activity and in the physiology of the larynx to help them with criteria to define the phonation distinctions so far observed in languages. In introducing the topic at the discussion seminar E. J. A. Henderson confined her examples to Cambodian, to illustrate the ‘sepulchral’ phonation appropriate to what she terms the lower register (Henderson 1952: 157); but a number of languages are listed in Catford 1964 as making lexically distinctive use of phonation types, Danish, Hindi, Nilotic, Javanese, and Gujerati (p. 36); and Ladefoged 1971 lists some of these and a considerable number of others, including Sindhi, Zulu, Hausa, Wolof, and French (pp. 12–19). In part this article is a continuation of that attempt to attract the attention of instrumental phoneticians to problems posed by phonation differences in languages such as these; but to a large extent it results from a re-examination of various published accounts of phonation distinctions that I undertook in the course of teaching general phonetics. The most comprehensive of these accounts, and the one that I shall chiefly refer to, is Catford 1964, and the tape-recording in which he illustrates a number of the phonation types that he distinguishes in that article; but I have also drawn on Sweet 1877 (3rd edition, 1906), guided by Henderson 1971, Pike 1943, Heffner 1950, Abercrombie 1967, and Ladefoged 1971.

In all the formal descriptions of Haitian Creole published so far the phonemics of the vowels includes only front unrounded and back rounded varieties:

Analysts confronted with the presence in the inventory of the front rounded series attribute to them the status of exceptions or loans.