The following account of Hull intonation uses the terminology of O'Connor and Arnold (1961 and 1973) in its formal description of intonation patterns and Halliday's (1967) theoretical framework in its discussion of the usage of such patterns. The analysis is based on recordings of the speech of a working-class native of Hull and the main findings have been checked by reference to a second speaker of the same dialect.

The Bai language () is spoken by approximately 1.6 million people in northwest Yunnan Province, China. Of the 25 minority languages spoken in Yunnan, where 33% of the population are ethnic minorities and 67% are Han Chinese, the Bai ethnic minority is second in population only to the Yi (Wiersma 1990, 2003; 2010 census). Bai is classified as a Tibeto-Burman language (Xu & Zhao 1964, 1984), although arguments have been raised as to its possible early Sinitic origins (Starostin 1994, 1995). A summary in French reviews Chinese loanwords, ancient Bai, and comparative Bai dialects (Dell 1981). The historical influence of Chinese on Bai has been significant, but evidence is not compelling that Bai is Sinitic (Norman 2003: 73). There are three major dialects of Bái: Jiànchuān (), Dàlĭ (), and Bìjiāng (). The data in this illustration represent the variety of Jianchuan (jian1239, BCA). The third author (), who was about 60 years old at the time of recording, is a male native of the Jianchuan region, originating from QiÁohǒu, a mountain village some 50 km southwest of Jianchuan city – a remote area known for salt mining and where the language has been less influenced by modern Chinese. These locations are indicated on the map of Yunnan (the southwesternmost province of China in an intensely minority-language-populated area) in Figure 1. The traditional geographical link from Qiaohou is to Jianchuan to the north rather than to Dali to the south, and many of the most distinctive characteristics of Jianchuan Bai described here are not found in Dali Bai.

Kejom [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m], the preferred autonym for the language more commonly known as Babanki, is a Central Ring Grassfields Bantu language (ISO 693-3: [bbk]) spoken in the Northwest Region of Cameroon (Hyman 1980, Hammarström et al. 2017, Simons & Fennig 2017). The language is spoken mainly in two settlements shown in Figure 1, Kejom Ketinguh [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m ↓kɘ́tÍⁿɡ̀uʔ] and Kejom Keku [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m ↓kɘ́k̀u], also known as Babanki Tungoh and Big Babanki, respectively, but also to some extent in diaspora communities outside of Cameroon. Simons & Fennig (2017) state that the number of speakers is increasing; however, the figure of 39,000 speakers they provide likely overestimates the number of fluent speakers in diaspora communities. The two main settlements’ dialects exhibit slight phonetic, phonological, and lexical differences but are mutually intelligible. The variety of Kejom described here is the Kejom Ketinguh variant spoken by the second author; all data and examples which we take into account are based on his speech.

In the paper ‘The symbolization of central approximants in the IPA’, Martin Ball and Joan Rahilly approach an interesting problem – the phonetic transcription of approximants other than the so-called semivowels. In the absence of special symbols in the IPA chart, they suggest that special characters should be used for the notation of approximant realizations made at the bilabial, dental, alveolar, lamino-postalveolar, palatal, velar, uvular and pharyngeal places of articulation. In their view, the introduction of new symbols should render those sounds comparable to other non-semivowel approximants for which special symbols are available, i.e., [ʋ] (labiodental), [ɹ] (apico-postalveolar) and [ɻ] (retroflex), while, at the same time, avoiding having to add the lowered diacritic to the voiced fricative symbols [β ð z ʒ ʁ ʕ].

Click consonants are well known for lacking allophonic variation. This lack of variation has been attributed to the existence of articulatory constraints on the coronal constrictions that are imposed by the existence of a second dorsal constriction. The current study investigates temporal acoustic differences among the four contrastive coronal click types in the /i/ and /u/ contexts in Mangetti Dune !Xung. Clicks have been described as being either non-affricated or affricated. However, when vowel context is taken into consideration, the typology is more complex. The alveolar click is non-affricated in both vowel contexts. The dental and lateral clicks are fricated in both contexts. The palatal click in the /i/ context has two clear anterior and posterior transients, followed by palatal frication, while in the /u/ context it is non-affricated. Results are consistent with an analysis of the palatal click in the /i/ context as involving allophonic secondary palatalization. There are trading relations between the duration of the click burst, frication noise and aspiration noise phases. Results have implications for understanding the synchronic and diachronic phonology of click consonants.

I read with interest the note by Leigh Lisker in JIPA 22 (pp 57–61) concerning the problem of marking force of articulation in phonetic transcription, and his regret that the 1989 revisions did not include diacritics for the fortis-lenis distinction. It is true that there exists no universally agreed definition of articulatory force, however, as Professor Lisker points out, phoneticians involved in transcription frequently encounter the need to differentiate sounds of different strength which appear to be the same in other phonetic dimensions.

Barry (1995a) presents data from Standard German which, among other things, illustrates the two different schwa vowels found in that variety. Barry's acoustic analysis demonstrates that orthographic final ‘-e’ has a regularly closer central vowel than orthographic final ‘-er’, and that the latter normally has no closing r-consonant. Barry, however, did not present data to examine which variety of schwa was found before orthographic ‘-r-’ when the ‘r’ is pronounced (e.g. when an inflectional affix is added to a final ‘-er’ form, as in ‘besser – bessere’).

Both Maddieson (1987) and Kelly (1987) discuss the problem of symbolising linguo-labials in Austronesian languages of Vanuatu, and highlight the alternative solutions to the problem of symbolising rare speech sounds. Maddieson outlines five possible answers: firstly no official IPA symbolisation be provided, allowing transcribers to utilise ad hoc personal transcriptions. Secondly, existing symbols could be modified by existing diacritics, though interpreted in a new way. An alternative to this would be to invent a new diacritic specifically to denote linguo-labial articulation and to attach it to an existing symbol. The final two strategies involve the invention of brand new unit symbols for the sounds, or the use of digraphs. Maddieson argues convincingly against the use of digraphs, but otherwise leaves the debate open for other contributors. Both Kelly (1987) and Bladon (1987) are also to some extent non-committal on the problem, but seem to favour the use of an existing or a new diacritic attached to standard labial/alveolar symbols.

It may be useful to separate out the issue of a choice of symbol from the issue of its status (official approval or individual usage). On the choice of symbol, if we endorse the apparent bias towards articulation as a defining criterion in the IPA then criteria like diachrony, perceptual similarity and even phonology are secondary at best. (Note that in making this inference from current practice, I do not wish to pre-empt any debate about whether the articulatory bias is valid!)

In the introduction to Part 1 (Miller and Tench, 1980) we claimed that although we were not presenting a comprehensive account of Hausa intonation, we were presenting aspects of it that had not received specific attention before. In the first part, we presented our findings in respect of isolated utterances; in this part, we wish to extend that analysis to cover features of Hausa intonation in connected text. Our procedure is to present an intonational analysis of two fables, each with a detailed commentary, and to accompany this up with some general comments.

Some current applications of the Association's alphabet, for example in EFL practice materials or in dictionaries, make it desirable to establish an ‘alphabetical order’ for the symbols. Various ad hoc orders have been used in the past, especially when giving lists of symbols in practice books, but no generally-agreed ordering has yet emerged (which, in the case of English at least, is perhaps surprising).

‘Investigation has shown’, writes Doke (1931: 31–2) ‘that at least two diphthongs and occur in certain Shona dialects.’ He does not report the nature of the investigation conducted. The present study suggests that there are no restrictions on vowel combinability, but that there are no grounds for postulating diphthongal unit phonemes in the language.

Sociolinguistic dialect research is based on the assumption that language is a form of social behaviour varying as much with social factors as with geography, which of course, does not prevent a geographical comparison in the current context. The present study deals with preliminary observations which result from testing and comparing the effect of age, sex and socio-economic status on linguistic variables in two recent, major urban sociolinguistic surveys in Canada: that of Ottawa, with 100 informants (Woods 1979), and SVEN, the Survey of Vancouver English with 240 informants (Gregg 1981).

It is surely incontestable that the IPA alphabet, like the system of vowel and consonant classification on which it is based, contains obvious anomalies; some or others of which have been discussed in recent proposals for reform (e.g. Breckwoldt 1971, McClure 1972, Hammarström 1973). Fox (1975), in an interesting attempt to widen the scope of the discussion, has argued that the anomalies are less serious than they appear, on the grounds that (a) they do not interfere with the practical usefulness of the alphabet, and (b) a more positive and more fundamental point—they reflect in some cases what appear to be linguistic universals, such as the potential use of retroflex consonants as a distinctive category and the widespread preference for voiced over voiceless nasals.

The Haitian Creole vocalic system includes both nasalized and oral varieties. Relatively recent analyses can be found in Hall 1953, D'Ans 1968, Valdman 1970, Férère 1977 and Férère 1979. Férère 1977 deals specifically with the oral front rounded phonemes. The solutions proposed by the various creolists do not always coincide. In this paper, the writer, a native speaker of Haitian Creole, does not intend to make a detailed study of their findings, but simply to review the different treatments offered for vowels and semiconsonants, in general, and to propose one which he believes to be most appropriate for the nasalized varieties in particular.

A. C. Gimson was editor of Le Maître Phonétique (m.f.), which evolved into the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, for 25 years from 1950. Besides his general editorial supervision, he provided those publications with two of his own early articles, over 30 reviews and numbers of congratulatory and obituary tributes. He gradually phased out the short transcribed passages of various languages he and others had provided for learners and teachers: they had become a less significant element among IPA adherents. His encouragement of progressively more substantial contributions to the pages of the m.f. inevitably led to its 1970 major transformation, with normal orthography, into the present Journal of the International Phonetic Association.

Wiktor Jassem's short article on rhythm (‘Indication of speech rhythm in the transcription of educated Southern English’) was published in 1949 in Le Maître Phonétique, the ancestor of today's Journal of the International Phonetic Association. The author was a young man aged 27 at the time, who was working on a longer treatment of the intonation of conversational English which was to be published three years later (Jassem 1952), just 60 years ago this year. Despite his youth, and despite the fact that he was not a native speaker of English, Jassem did not hesitate to take on giants, and to suggest in this paper that his treatment of rhythm is superior to that of both Henry Sweet and Harold Palmer, as well, he adds in the 1952 book, as that of his mentor Daniel Jones.