This study investigates utterance-final pitch accents in declaratives in two contact languages (Catalan and Spanish) as produced by two groups of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals (Catalan-dominant and Spanish-dominant). It contributes to a growing body of research showing that bilinguals transfer the intonational patterns of their native language to their non-native language, and it provides a sociolinguistic profile of an intonational variable in a language contact situation. We also examine the interaction of native and non-native patterns within the performance of the bilinguals. Evidence is presented for the existence of a process of phonetic category assimilation of non-native pitch contrasts to native pitch contours, as well as for phonetic new-category formation in second language learning.

Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken by 53 million speakers in India, according to census figures from 1991, predominantly in the state of Tamil Nadu. There are also sizeable communities of Tamil speakers elsewhere, including Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore, in all of which it has the status of a national language. Tamil is diglossic, the formal or ‘literary’ variety still largely conforming to standards set in the thirteenth century by the Tamil grammarian Pavanandi. It is used in almost all written media, and also for certain high-register functions. In all other situations colloquial Tamil is used and is characterized by considerable regional and social variation.

In several dialects of English notably in the southern part of Britain (but excluding Wales), a velarised or “dark” allophone of /l/ occurs syllable-finally, and post-vocalically in syllable-final consonant clusters (Wells 1982; Gimson 1980). A variant of this velarised [l], typically associated with Cockney, but increasingly admitted as a feature of South-Eastern Urban English, is a “vowelised” or vocalised form realised as a non-syllabic back vocoid (approximately [Y] or a rounded equivalent [ö] or [ʊ] (Wells 1982; Hughes and Trudgill 1986)). Thus “milk” may be realised variously as [mIlk], [mIYk], [mIök] or [mIʊk].

Recent acoustic studies have provided evidence that /u/ (goose) and /ʊ/ (foot) have fronted in the standard accent of England in the last fifty years, but what is less clear is whether this fronting is due entirely to a repositioning of the tongue or whether it has been accompanied by an unrounding of the lips. Four experiments were carried out to shed light on this issue. An acoustic study of anticipatory coarticulation in /s/ in the first of these suggested a similar degree of lip-protrusion for young speakers whose F2 of /u/ was raised compared with that of older speakers. Compatibly, judgments of lip-rounding elicited from cross-dubbed auditory-visual stimuli and an analysis of lip movement showed young speakers' /u/ to be produced with rounded lips. Their tongue positions and movements in the final experiment were found to be almost as advanced for /u/ as for /i/ (fleece) and nearer to a central position for lax /ʊ/ (foot). Taken together, these results confirm firstly, that the diachronic shift in /u/ has involved a realignment of the tongue, but not of the lips; and secondly, that the diachronic shift in /ʊ/ is likely to be a more recent innovation than that of its tense counterpart.

This paper aims to describe pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops in an endangered language, Scottish Gaelic. Our small-scale study investigates several acoustic parameters of Scottish Gaelic stop consonants designed to measure the duration and noisiness of aspiration of the stop in its immediate phonetic context. Our study expands on previous phonetic descriptions of phonemic (pre-)aspiration in three ways: firstly, we provide a more complete durational description of Scottish Gaelic than previous work in the literature; secondly, we apply a new measure, band-pass filtered zero crossing rate (Gordeeva & Scobbie 2010), in order to examine the noisiness of aspiration in addition to durational characteristics. The results from this measure are presented in tandem with durational results in order to assess its usefulness for future research. Thirdly, we consider the possibility of change in the Scottish Gaelic stop system by examining data from older and younger speakers. Results suggest that band-pass filtered zero crossing rate is a useful tool and should be considered in future research on aspiration. Also, durational and zero crossing results indicate that younger speakers have shorter and less noisy pre-aspiration than older speakers. We discuss these results as a possible sound change in progress.

As a western Slavic language of the Indo-European family, Czech is closest to Slovak and Polish. It is spoken as a native language by nearly 10 million people in the Czech Republic (Czech Statistical Office n.d.). About two million people living abroad, mostly in the USA, Canada, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and the UK, claim Czech heritage (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic 2009). However, it is not known how many of them are native speakers of Czech.

Quasi-spontaneous dialogues from six languages which, according to recent discussion of rhythmic types, belong to three rhythmic groups – Russian and Bulgarian as ‘stress-timed’, Italian and Greek as ‘syllable-timed’ and Polish and Czech as an intermediate ‘mixed’ type – were examined for the following segmental reduction phenomena: reduction of consonant clusters, weakening of consonant articulation, residual properties from elided consonants in the original context segments, phonetic schwa-isation and syllable elision. The hypothesis tested was that there are comparable reduction phenomena in all languages since all languages allow for variation in the time and effort invested in any given part of an utterance as a means to support the relative weight of elements within the information structure. This hypothesis was borne out in principle, though there were a small number of exceptions across the six languages to the occurrence of reduction types examined.

The IPA does not have agreed symbols for some laterals. This is hardly surprising considering the relative infrequency of the contrasts involved. The majority of languages either have no contrasts involving laterals, or have at the most one lateral. A few languages, however, have two, three, or even four lateral approximants that contrast simply in place of articulation. Contrasts among trills are even more uncommon than among laterals. Most languages do not trill any articulator. Only a handful of languages have contrasts between trills made at different places. This note will present data on some unusual contrasts involving laterals and trills.

Shanghai Chinese (Shanghainese; 上海话) is a Wu dialect (ISO 639-3; code: wuu) spoken in the city of Shanghai (CN-31), one of the four municipalities in the People's Republic of China. Over the last century, the dialect has been heavily influenced by neighbouring dialects spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, such as Jianghuai Mandarin (江淮官话), the Suzhou Wu dialect (吴语苏州话), and the Ningbo Wu dialect (吴语宁波话), in addition to two other, more distant dialects, Cantonese (广东话) and Northern Mandarin (北方官话). Most native speakers of Shanghai Chinese are in fact descendants of immigrants from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces who moved to Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. More recently, the position of Shanghai Chinese has been eroded with the influx of immigrants from other parts of the country and the widespread adoption of Standard Chinese.

In the hope of provoking discussion, an attempt is made to combine articulatory, perceptual and acoustic considerations in relating the observed variants of R to one another. An underlying, and in itself debatable point of departure for the discussion is that is a universal non-lateral liquid from which all R variants ultimately stem.

Burmese is the official language of Burma. (In English, ‘Burmese’ and ‘Burma’ are also known as ‘Myanmar’, and ‘Rangoon’ as ‘Yangon’.) It is the major language of the Burmic branch of Tibeto-Burman, and is spoken natively by upwards of 30 million people in the lower valleys of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin rivers, the central plain of Burma and the Irrawaddy Delta, and non-natively by up to another 10 million speakers of other languages in Burma.

In Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS), [h + voiceless stop] clusters are realized as long pre- and postaspirated stops. This study investigates if a new class of stops (realized as geminates with variable degrees of pre- and postaspiration) has emerged in this dialect, or if postaspiration in these clusters results from articulatory overlap. An experiment was carried out in which WAS speakers produced [h + voiceless stop] clusters under changes in speech rate and stress location. The duration of postaspiration, measured as voice onset, did not show systematic effects of any of the experimental variables. Moreover, trade-offs were observed between voice onset and preaspiration plus closure durations. These results indicate that postaspiration in WAS [h + voiceless stop] clusters is the consequence of extensive articulatory overlap. It is further hypothesized that the lengthening of closures in WAS stops preceded by [h] results from a different gestural mechanism affecting all [hC] clusters in this dialect. From a broader perspective, since extensive overlap and consonantal lengthening do not occur in the [hC] clusters of other Spanish varieties, these findings lend support to the idea that intergestural coordination patterns can be dialect-specific.

A hundred years from now a large number of presently spoken languages will no longer be viable means of communication, and the distinctive sounds that they contain will have disappeared. Of the nearly seven thousand languages in the world listed by Grimes (1992), about ten per cent are spoken by around a thousand people or less. As the speakers of these languages grow old, and their children go to schools in which the main languages of the country predominate, phoneticians will no longer have access to the wide variety of sounds currently in use. Toda, a language spoken by about a thousand speakers in the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India, has some unusual sounds that will probably not exist in our great grandchildren's times. Among them are the six trills which this paper will describe. Tongue tip trills occur in about one third of the world's languages (Maddieson 1984). None of the languages in Maddieson's sample has two contrasting apical trills without secondary articulations, although they have been reported in Malayalam (Ladefoged 1971). To the best of our knowledge only Toda has three contrasting trills; and almost certainly no other language has surface contrasts between palatalized and non-palatalized versions of three lingual trills. Toda is a rich source for trill-seeking phoneticians.

Results of an acoustic study of root-initial /t th t'/ for eleven speakers of Witsuwit'en (Athabaskan) are presented. Values averaged across speaker means suggest that Witsuwit'en ejectives have a brief period of creaky voice and slow rise time at vowel onset relative to the voiceless unaspirated stops. However, there is considerable inter-speaker variation in VOT and f0 perturbation, with negligible correlation between these measures, contrary to the predictions of the ejective typologies proposed by Lindau (1984) and Kingston (1985). Results of a perception study indicate that the ejective-voiceless unaspirated contrast is more difficult than the other laryngeal contrasts even for native listeners. Implications of the Witsuwit'en data for the categorization of ejectives are discussed.

The style of speech illustrated is that typical of the educated younger generation in Hong Kong. The recording is that of a 22-year-old female university student who has lived all her life in Hong Kong.

Gujarati and White Hmong are among a small handful of languages known to maintain a phonemic contrast between breathy and modal voice across both obstruents and vowels. Given that breathiness on stop consonants is realized as a breathy-voiced aspirated release into the following vowel, how is consonant breathiness distinguished from vocalic breathiness, if at all? We examine acoustic and electroglottographic data of potentially ambiguous CV sequences collected from speakers of Gujarati and White Hmong, to determine what properties reliably distinguish breathiness associated with stop consonants from breathiness associated with vowels comparing both within and across these two unrelated languages. Results from the two languages are strikingly similar: only the early timing and increased magnitude of the various acoustic reflexes of breathiness phonetically distinguish phonemic consonantal breathiness from phonemic vocalic breathiness.

The type of analysis best suited to intonation (what Stockwell, 1972, calls the ‘representation’ question) is not under discussion in this article. In order to save taking up space with such analytical preliminaries, Belfast intonation is described in this article largely in a framework similar to that of Halliday (1967). We describe firstly the forms of intonation in that dialect; then the use of such forms; and end with some implications for linguistics in general. The analysis is based on recordings of the speech of an educated speaker of an urban Anglo-Irish dialect of Belfast. The main findings were checked by reference to a second speaker of the same dialect.

The segmental characteristics of the English spoken in Singapore are quite widely described (e.g. Tongue 1979, Platt and Weber 1980, Brown 1988a, Brown 1991). However, the suprasegmental aspects, such as intonation, are less well documented, even though it is widely accepted that it is the suprasegmental aspects that contribute most to the distinctive character of “foreign” accents such as that of Singapore (Brown 1991: 4).

Earlier studies on Standard Italian describe polar questions as being characterised by a terminal rise, as opposed to a terminal fall for statements, where a low/falling accentual movement precedes the terminal part of the contour in both sentence types. The same is generally claimed for the Northern and Central Italian varieties (including Florentine, i.e. the variety from which Standard Italian stems), whereas Southern accents are characterised by an accentual rise followed by a terminal fall, being therefore the primary cue for question in non-terminal position. However, a closer look at the existing literature on regional Italian question intonation reveals that such a geographical distribution of intonational features across Italian accents is not that clear-cut. A reason for this discrepancy might be the different speaking styles – here intended as the broad spontaneous vs. read distinction – of the spoken productions analysed. The aim of this paper is to call into question the claim that a terminal rise preceded by an accentual low/fall is the most widespread intonational feature for marking questioning across Italian accents. The goal is to provide a clearer picture of question intonation in Italian by looking at the distribution of the rise as either on terminal or non-terminal position across a large number of varieties, where speech materials have been elicited with the same methodology, and they are therefore homogeneous with respect to speaking style. Intonation analysis has been carried out on spontaneous yes–no questions extracted from the Map Task dialogues collected in the CLIPS national corpus (Corpora e Lessici di Italiano Parlato e Scritto – Corpora and Lexicons of Spoken and Written Italian) covering 15 varieties of Italian. Results of this analysis on the Northern, Central, and Southern polar questions reveals that the accentual rise prevails, and that the distribution of the rise across varieties is independent of the geography.

Whistled speech is a complementary natural style of speech to be found in more than thirty languages of the world. This phenomenon, also called ‘whistled language’, enables distant communication amid the background noise of rural environments. Whistling is used as a sound source instead of vocal fold vibration. The resulting acoustic signal is characterised by a narrow band of frequencies encoding the words. Such a strong reduction of the frequency spectrum of the voice explains why whistled speech is language-specific, relying on selected salient key features of a given language. However, for a fluent whistler, a spoken sentence transposed into whistles remains highly intelligible in several languages, and whistled languages therefore represent a valuable source of information for phoneticians. This study is based on original data collected in seven different cultural communities or gathered during perceptual experiments which are described here. Whistling is first found to extend the strategy at play in shouted voice. Various whistled speech practices are then described using a new typology. A statistical analysis of whistled vowels in non-tonal languages is presented, as well as their categorisation by non-whistlers. The final discussion proposes that whistled vowels in non-tonal languages are a reflection of the perceptual integration of formant proximities in the spoken voice.