Ever since the appearance of the monograph On Defining the Phoneme (Twaddell, 1935), it has become customary to classify the views of the phoneme into the four categories: mentalistic, physical, functional, and abstract. The reader is also referred to Jones (1957, and 1967: 212 ff.) and Fudge (1970) for discussions on that basis. However, we can achieve additional insight into the problem of defining the phoneme if we classify the views of the phoneme, this time, on a populational basis. By this, we mean whether the phoneme is defined as a unit of (1) an idiolect, (2) a dialect, (3) a multidialect, or (4) a supralect.

At the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences held in Aix-en-Provence (19–24 August 1991), Professor Peter Ladefoged was presented with a Gold Medal, jointly offered by the International Organizing Committee of the Congress, the International Phonetic Association, and the International Society of Phonetic Sciences, in recognition of his contribution to the subject of phonetics over the forty years of his career to date. Professor Mario Rossi, as the President of the International Organizing Committee of the Congress, asked me to say a few words at the banquet in Peter Ladefoged's honor. This article is intended to give an expanded version of those comments a more permanent form, and to bring an appreciation of his outstanding contribution to a wider audience.

Informants recorded a version of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’, adapted from the North German Variety in the I.P.A. Principles (1973). The German text was rewritten with considerable emphasis on lexical differences, and only slightly less emphasis on morphological and syntactic differences, especially word order. Words such as Wanderer in High German (hereinafter H.G.) were regarded as ‘non-Bavarian’ by native speakers and virtually all examples of the imperfect tense were changed to the perfect tense. It is usual in this dialect, which is normally known as Upper Bavarian (hereinafter U.B.), for personal pronouns to follow verb forms, as a result of which they are very rarely stressed.

C. E. Capell's article ‘Transcription, Vowel and Consonant Systems of Upper Bavarian Dialect’, in JIPA, vol. 9, no. 1 (June 1979), was interesting as being one of the very few contributions in English to the study of this phonologically fascinating German dialect, but was unfortunately so full of straightforward errors of data and interpretation that it gravely misrepresents the dialect. The following article is an attempt to set the record straight in all but a few very minor points.

Until recently, phoneticians have not spent a great deal of time analyzing waveforms; but the advent of computer systems that make it easy for personal computers of all kinds to record and display sounds has led to this becoming a more common practice. Several aspects of sounds are clearly distinguishable from the waveforms of a phrase. Stop closures are very evident, as are differences between voiced sounds which have repetitive waveforms and voiceless sounds which do not. Differences in amplitude can be used to distinguish high frequency, high intensity sibilants from lower intensity non-sibilant fricatives; and nasals and laterals usually have smaller amplitudes than the louder adjacent vowels. An expanded view of the waveform allows us to see intervals between peaks in the damped wave of a voiced sound, and thus to calculate the frequency of the first formant. Nasals can often be distinguished from vowels in these expanded waveforms, not only by their smaller amplitudes but also by the less clear formant structure.

In this article we examine the phonetic properties of labialization in Nuuchahnulth, a Southern Wakashan language spoken on Vancouver Island. Given the moribund status of this language, we make use of available archival materials from the early twentieth century along with more recent recordings in order to ascertain the exact nature of the process. Early work on this language was conducted by Edward Sapir, who transcribed data in a more or less phonetic form. A second goal of our paper is to test the accuracy of Sapir's transcriptions. Finally, we examine the characteristics of Nuuchahnulth labialization which mark it as an important typological phenomenon.

This issue of the Journal contains further contributions to the series ‘Illustrations of the IPA’. As in the case of previous contributions, the recordings accompanying them are available at http://web.uvic.ca/ling/ipa/handbook/. Illustrations published in the Journal prior to 1998 appear in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (IPA 1999). Later contributions will be incorporated into future editions of the Handbook.

Three American English diphthongs involving onsets in the back of the vowel space were investigated by means of acoustic measurements, discriminant analysis, and perceptual experiments. These diphthongs, termed DOOR/WAR, TOY, and STAR, were observed in the speech of ten young women residing in southern Michigan. The diphthongs were elicited in a variety of /b/-, /ɡ/-, and /h/-initial words (e.g. board, Boyd, and barred). Words with similar consonantal margins but different nuclei (e.g. bode, baud, and bod) were elicited, as well. The DOOR/WAR and TOY words were compared with bode and baud (and similar words with initial /ɡ/ and /h/), while the STAR words were compared with baud and bod (and similar words with initial /ɡ/ and /h/). All three methods of investigation showed that the initial part of the DOOR/WAR and TOY diphthongs more closely resembles that of bode than baud. On the other hand, the initial part of the STAR diphthong was shown to be intermediate between that of baud and that of bod.

An important task of specialists in any field is the elaboration of a clear and adequate terminology. The coining and popularization of well thought out technical terms both reflects theoretical advances and facilitates clarity of thought and expression.

A multi-speaker acoustic study on citation tones in Kaifeng Mandarin, referred to as LH, HL, H and L, shows that L is realized as three different subtypes by different speakers, i.e. dipping, falling and falling with lengthening, while generally being longer than the other three tones and frequently spoken with creaky voice in part of the vowel. This inter-speaker variation is reflected in the different transcriptions of Kaifeng L that have been given in the literature. We argue that a L-tone is intrinsically less salient than a H-tone, due to a lack of phonetic space in the low pitch range as well as to a potential ambiguity between contextual low pitch around f0 peaks and low pitch due to L-tones, and thus more likely to be enhanced.

In a previous issue of this journal, John Coleman (2004) reviewed the written-up version of a poster I presented at the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona (Battaner-Moro 2003, henceforth BM). The aim of the poster was to discuss the evolution of Firthian prosodic analysis. In his review, Coleman derives from it ‘an ignorance or a neglect of Firth's publications prior to 1948' on my part (p. 211). He focusses his criticisms on the following three statements:

1. ‘Firth never did prosodic analysis.’

2. ‘There is a complete absence of programmatic work in Firth's works.’

3. ‘Prosodic analysis was developed by the members of the London School and not at all by John Firth.’

Huangyan dialect (, local name: [wɔ̤ɲjɛ˜̤wa̤]) is a variety of Taizhou dialect () as spoken in Zhejiang Province in China1 (see Figure 1).2 Huangyan District had a population of 616,000 people in 2019.3 The Zhejiang Taizhou dialect belongs to the Wu dialect group, which forms the second largest dialect group in China (after Mandarin). The language genealogy of Huangyan is presented in Figure 2. Wu dialects are spoken in the city of Shanghai, Zhejiang Province, southern Jiangsu Province and bordering areas (see Figure 3), an area with an estimated population of 80 million people in 2013 (Lewis 2009). The Wu dialects are not mutually intelligible with (Standard) Mandarin and often not even with each other (Norman 2003, Wang 2014).

One of the major non-native accents of English is what for convenience of reference we shall call Panjabi English (PE)—the English spoken by educated Panjabi speakers (for Panjabi see Gill & Gleason, 1962). This accent has assumed a certain importance over the last two decades because of the settlement of a large number of Panjabi speakers from India and Pakistan in various English-speaking countries, chiefly Britain. Nevertheless, it has not attracted much attention from the linguist. One possible reason for this neglect is that many linguists hold the view that there can be no ‘system’ in a non-native variety of a language, which, they may contend, is the result of an attempt to imitate, with varying degrees of inefficiency, some native variety of the language (though now at several generations' remove).

Matthews (1981) offers several criticisms of an earlier article of mine, ‘The second Great Vowel Shift?’ (Bauer, 1979). Some of these criticisms appear to arise from a misunderstanding of my original article that is entirely due to my own imprecise formulations. I should therefore like to set the record straight, and also to raise a methodological problem implicit in Matthews's criticisms.