In a variety of Sasak called Ampenan Sasak in this paper, traditional documentation and analytical methods based on auditory perception reveal allophonic patterns in alternations of height among mid-vowels. High mid-vowels occur in final syllables ending in [ʔ] or no-coda (e.g. [tokoʔ] ‘fish species native to Lombok’) while low mid-vowels occur in final syllables ending in all other consonants (e.g. [tɔkɔl] ‘to sit’). However, words deviate from these patterns in several minimal pairs (e.g. [bəɾəmbok] ‘to discuss’ and [bəɾəmbɔk] ‘to breathe’) and in some borrowings (e.g. [agostos] ‘August’), suggesting a quasi-phonemic status for back mid-vowels; they behave like both phonemes and allophones. This study analyzes the phonetic properties of mid-vowels through an acoustic analysis of the F1 and F2 of 2,448 vowel tokens. Results suggest that mid-vowels are largely predictable among non-borrowed vocabulary. In final syllables, syllable openness serves as a predictor for the height of mid-vowels. In pre-final syllables, syllable openness has no effect on the height of the vowel. Rather, the height of pre-final mid-vowels is predictable based on the height of the final-syllable vowel. In consideration of both elicitation and acoustic evidence, this paper adopts a descriptive approach by stating that Ampenan Sasak back mid-vowels are largely predictable, with some exceptions. Further, the paper questions whether all sounds must be identified as a ‘phoneme’ or an ‘allophone’ and argues that quasi-phonemic segments are a valuable intermediate descriptor for both phonological theory and language documentation.

The intonation of Spanish does not appear to have received the same degree of attention as the Spanish segmental system. Furthermore, much of the information available and the analyses proposed until fairly recently seem to have been largely arrived at on the basis of subjective, impressionistic considerations. It is only in the last few years that there seems to have been a shift of emphasis in the study of Spanish prosody and more research of an experimental and instrumental nature is being carried out.

The following specimen is a version of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ in the Breton dialect of Groix, an island situated off the south coast of Brittany. Groix Breton belongs to the Vannetais dialect group. It has been described in the author's Grammaire structurale du Breton de l'Île de Groix (Ternes 1970).

Munji (aka Munjani or Munjiwar; ISO 639-3: [mnj]) is spoken in the Kuran wa Munjan district of Badakhshan province in Afghanistan. Munji is classified as an Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Iranian, Eastern, Southeastern, Pamir language (Lewis 2009). There are about 5,300 Munji speakers (Beyer & Beck 2011). There are two main dialects, which divide into the northern and southern halves of the valley (see Figure 1). These dialects exhibit some regular sound changes and a small percentage of lexical differences. Munji speakers are aware of the differences, but there is no trouble in mutual understanding.

Changsha Chinese is a Xiang dialect (ISO 639-3: [hsn]) spoken in the city of Changsha (CN-430100), the capital of Hunan province (CN-43) in China. Changsha is the political, economic, cultural, scientific, and educational centre of Hunan. As of 2021, Changsha had a resident population of approximately seven million in urban areas. Figure 1 shows the location of Changsha on the map of China.

Armenian (or , /hɑjeˈɾen/, ISO 639-1 hy) comprises an independent branch of the Indo-European language family.1 Its earliest attested ancestor is Classical Armenian in the fifth century CE (see Godel 1975; Thomson 1989; DeLisi 2015; Macak 2016). Modern Armenian is classified into two dialect families: Eastern Armenian (ISO 639-3 hye) and Western Armenian (ISO 639-3 hyw). Eastern Armenian is spoken in modern-day Armenia, and large speaker communities also exist in Georgia, Russia and Iran (shown in Figure 1). Western Armenian was historically spoken in the Ottoman Empire, but now includes varieties spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas (Donabédian 2018). There are substantial Western Armenian speaker communities in Turkey (Istanbul), Lebanon (Beirut), Syria (Aleppo, Damascus), California (Fresno, Los Angeles County), France (Marseilles), Australia (Sydney) and Argentina (Buenos Aires). There are also recent diaspora communities of Eastern Armenian speakers in California (Karapetian 2014), as well as communities of Western Armenian speakers in Armenia who escaped the Armenian genocide during World War I, who repatriated after World War II, or who fled the ongoing Syrian civil war. UNESCO lists Western Armenian as an endangered language in Turkey, and there are significant language promotion efforts in many diaspora communities that are intended to combat declining use by speaker generations born in the Americas and Europe (Al-Bataineh 2015; Chahinian & Bakalian 2016).

The spoken accent of children is strongly influenced by those of their peers but how rapidly do they adapt to sound changes in progress? We addressed this issue in an acoustic analysis of child and adult vowels of West Central Bavarian (WCB) that may be subject to an increasing influence by the Standard German (SG) variety. The study was a combination of longitudinal and apparent-time analyses: re-recordings from 20 WCB children in their first, second and third years of primary school at two schools in rural Bavaria were compared with those of 21 WCB adult speakers from the same area. The question was whether the children’s pronunciation diverged from the adults’ pronunciation and increasingly so in their second and third years. Participants produced stressed vowels in isolated mostly trochaic words in which WCB vs. SG differences were expected. Both adult/child and longitudinal changes in the direction of the standard were found in the children’s tendency towards a merger of two open vowels and a collapse of a long/short consonant contrast, neither of which exists in SG. There was some evidence that, unlike the adults, the children were beginning to develop tensity (= tenseness) and rounding contrasts, which occur in SG but not WCB. There were no observed changes to the pattern of opening and closing diphthongs, which differ markedly between the two varieties. The general conclusion is that WCB change is most likely to occur as a consequence of exaggerating phonetic variation that already happens to be in the direction of the standard.

Malagasy is the westernmost Austronesian language and belongs to the South East Barito subgroup of the Western Malayo-Polynesian subfamily (Dahl 1988, Rasoloson & Rubino 2005). Dahl (1951) presents widely-accepted evidence that Malagasy is most closely related to the Indonesian language Ma’anyan of Kalimantan (South Borneo). The term Malagasy refers to a macrolanguage (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2014), with many regional dialects distributed throughout the island of Madagascar, which lies off the east African coast across from Mozambique (see Figure 1) and has a population of over 22 million (INSTAT 2018). The central area of the country, or the ‘Central Highlands’, is a plateau of up to 5000 feet and includes the capital city of Antananarivo, with a metropolitan population of about four million. The dialect historically spoken in and around Antananarivo is called Merina, and it served as the primary basis for development of the standardized, institutional language referred to as Malagasy Ofisialy ‘Official Malagasy’ (OM).

The contrast between bilabial and labiodental fricatives is comparatively rare in the world's languages. In his survey of 317 languages Maddieson (1984) notes only one that has the full set of voiced and voiceless sounds [φ, β, f, v], and only four other languages that contrast just the voiced pair. There is no doubt that these contrasts do occur, and that phonologists such as Sagey (1986) are wrong in neglecting to provide for them. This note will provide further particulars of the contrast in languages in which it has not been so well documented in the general linguistic literature. It will also suggest that this contrast may not be made in the same way in all languages, and discuss the implications for the IPA and for theories of phonetic description.

Yes-no questions, when unmarked morphologically and syntactically, are marked intonationally. The intonation of this kind of question is generally characterized either by a terminal rise or a higher overall fundamental frequency (F0). Ultan (1978) found that 38 of a sample of 53 languages use the first pattern, and 18 the second. Even in tone languages, these two patterns are not unusual. For example, yes-no questions in Hausa have a final jump to an extra high level regardless of the nature of the final tones (Miller & Tench 1980); in Mandarin both the top line and the bottom line delimiting the pitch range are raised in question intonation (Shen 1990). However, the existence of a downward intonation as an alternative, for instance in English (Bolinger 1989) and French (Fonagy & Berard 1973) has been reported. Although a number of languages have been shown to have a fall for this kind of question, it remains uncertain just how the property of being a question is conveyed. This paper attempts to investigate this issue through an acoustical analysis and a perceptual test of Changsha Chinese, a 6-tone Chinese dialect of the Xiang group, spoken in Hunan. This dialect is selected, because (1) no tone sandhi occurs in this dialect, facilitating the interpretation of the F0 contours in the acoustical analysis; and (2) no empirical study of F0 in this dialect has been previously conducted. While the majority of empirical works on intonation use data collected from read speech, this study undertakes the exploration of natural speech.

The Journal has received this newsletter which describes a well-developed system for the computer coding of phonetic symbols. Although the account shows a bias towards the transcription of English, the system does provide for an unusually wide range of prosodic codes and of diacritic symbols, including some for which the current International Phonetic Alphabet makes no provision. Given the Journal's active interest in the subject of computer coding of phonetic symbols, and the wish to encourage further debate and comment in our pages, we are publishing this particular newsletter in its entirety. In the discussion of the symbols, it is necessary to be able to distinguish ‘l’ (lower case ‘l’) from ‘i’ (upper case ‘i’). We have therefore used the serifed typeface of the original for the citation of the symbol forms (—Ed.).

Contrastive phonology has been preoccupied with the phoneme concept and the isolated word. The Contrastive Structure Series demonstrates this quite clearly. In Moulton's contrastive comparison of English and German sounds (Moulton, 1962), to take a representative example of the series and of contrastive phonological studies in general, 107 pages out of 145 deal with the consonant and vowel phonemes in English and German words and with their contrastive analysis. Only 31 pages treat stress (largely word stress), intonation and the inevitable juncture, which is the epitome of word phonemics in that it looks at the incidence of boundary signals at word and morpheme boundaries, e.g. antrat and das Kitzeln with strongly aspirated stops as against Landrat and die Skizze with weakly aspirated or unaspirated stops indicating different divisions between word final and initial consonants (p. 142). I would like to mention in passing that this opposition is artificially constructed in word material by a linguist on the basis of the equally artificial codification in Siebs (de Boor et al., 1969), where again hardly any tribute is paid to segmental sentence phonology (Kohler, 1970).

As the IPA chart is published in so many places, and is used also by non-phoneticians, I suggest that we should revise it rarely and, when it is revised, try to make only minimal changes in the chart. Nonetheless, I think that the 1993 revision of the chart resulting from the most recent Council vote (IPA 1993) is not ideal, and a few minor changes are needed. When the time comes, I suggest that the Council should discuss the following six proposals.

The following two texts were published by the predecessor of our journal over half a century ago and illustrate the characteristic nature of its publications at that time.

The idea of having a version of the IPA chart in Chinese was initiated by a group of Chinese phoneticians and dialectologists in 2006. The situation that existed at the time was that the IPA terms used in mainstream Chinese textbooks and in classrooms were still following various older versions of the chart and principles. For instance, there were no approximants in the consonant chart; instead, the Chinese translation of the term ‘frictionless continuant’ was still listed in the consonant chart. After the revised IPA chart was released in 2005, Chinese phoneticians and dialectologists considered it a good opportunity to promote the updated IPA terminology in Chinese, reflected in a Chinese version of the chart. In the winter of 2006, the Phonetic Association of China organized an advisory committee and a working committee to undertake the translation. Following some months of e-mail communications among committee members, a meeting was organized at the Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, on 7 January 2007. Five members of the advisory committee and seven members of the working committee participated in the final discussion. At the meeting in Beijing, we worked out the 2007 version of the IPA chart in Chinese that is reproduced here. This chart was first published in the first issue of the Chinese journal Fangyan 方 言 [Dialect] in 2007. The copyright symbol at the top of the chart indicates that the Chinese version is a work of the Phonetic Association of China, which is, officially speaking, a member of the Linguistic Society of China. The intention of the Association in disseminating the chart has been to unify and clarify the traditions of Chinese phonetic usage, to standardize Chinese terminology for referring to speech sounds and categories, and to communicate and promote the knowledge of IPA practices to Chinese-speaking society.