Goemai is an Afroasiatic (Chadic, West Chadic A, Angas-Goemai group) language spoken in Central Nigeria. The name Goemai [ɡmi] is used by the speakers themselves to refer to both their language and their ethnic group. To outsiders, they are better known under the name Ankwe – a name that is also commonly found in the older linguistic, anthropological and historical literature. The Goemai live as farmers, fishermen and hunters in villages throughout the lowland savannah region south of the Jos Plateau and north of the Benue River, an area that is known geographically as the Great Muri Plains. The economy is based on agriculture (yam, millet, guineacorn, groundnut, beniseed) and is supplemented with fishing and hunting. Politically, the area belongs to Plateau State, and more specifically to the Local Government Areas Shendam and Qua’an Pan. Smaller Goemai-speaking communities are found in surrounding Local Government Areas as well as in Jos, the capital of Plateau State.

Russian (ISO 639-3 rus) is an Indo-European East Slavic language spoken by about 162 million people as their first language and about another 110 million as their second language (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013), mainly in the Russian Federation (where it is the native language of about 80% of the population, see Berger 1998, Federal’naja služba gosudarstvennoj statistiki (Federal State Statistics Service) 2012: 228–232) and in the other former republics of the USSR (among which it is co-official in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan). Large groups of Russian speakers (so-called heritage speakers) also live in Europe (especially Germany: almost 3 million or 3.5% of the population, Brehmer 2007: 166–167), Israel (about 1 million or 20%, Glöckner 2008) and the United States (850,000 or 0.3%, Shin & Kominski 2010: 6).

Murcian Spanish (MuSp) is a regional variety of Spanish spoken in the Comunidad Autónoma de Murcia in south-eastern Spain. It is commonly heard in the capital city, Murcia, with 450,000 inhabitants, situated in the Segura River plain (Central Zone), and in a number of towns like Cartagena (Coastal Zone), Yecla and Jumilla (Altiplano or High Plateau Zone), Lorca and Águilas (Guadalentín River Zone), and Caravaca and Calasparra (North-western Zone). The overall population of the region amounts to well over 1,100,000 inhabitants (Hernández-Campoy 2003: 621).

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 March–April 2015, ten additional members of the new Council of the International Phonetic Association were elected. They are: Plinio Barbosa, Martine Grice, Asher Laufer, Wai-Sum Lee, Kofi Adu Manyah, Alexis Michaud, Jane Stuart-Smith, Marija Tabain, Masaki Taniguchi, and Jacqueline Vaissière. John Ohala, elected in the previous round, has resigned from the Council.

The International Phonetic Association's by-laws recognize as Life Members those members who have paid membership dues for over 30 years. The awarding of Life Membership is intended to honour the impressive records of service of long-time IPA members, and to acknowledge their contribution in a symbolic and in a practical way.

The development of Standard Austrian German (SAG; de-AT) is closely linked to the development of Standard German German (SGG; de-DE) as spoken in Northern Germany. Traditionally, SAG is strongly geared towards SGG norms. The orientation towards SGG norms goes back to at least 1750, when Maria Theresia ordered the adoption of the Upper Saxonian norms in place at that time (Ebner 1969, Wiesinger 1989). Since then, SAG pronunciation is modelled on SGG and Austrian newsreaders are instructed according to the norms of Duden's (2005) Aussprachewörterbuch and Siebs (1958, with an addendum for Austria) (Wächter-Kollpacher 1995, Soukup & Moosmüller 2011). This procedure leads to an inconsistent usage of SGG features in Austrian broadcasting media (Wiesinger 2009, Soukup & Moosmüller 2011, Hildenbrandt & Moosmüller 2015). Therefore, from a methodological point of view, pronunciation used in the Austrian broadcasting media is unsuitable for defining SAG (Moosmüller 2015).

Francoprovençal (known locally as patois) is the glottonym used as a cover term for a highly fragmented Romance dialect-grouping. These varieties are spoken in south-eastern France, and neighbouring parts of Switzerland and Italy; diasporic communities are also reported to maintain the use of Francoprovençal in Germany, Canada, and the United States (see Nagy 2011). Francoprovençal enjoys varying levels of official status across these regions. In France, for example, Francoprovençal was only recognised by the Ministry for Culture and Communication in 1999 as a ‘language of France’, but it does not constitute one of the handful of regional languages protected by law that are permitted in the education system. Conversely, in the Aosta Valley (Italy), which enjoys an autonomous status, Francoprovençal is protected under Federal law, and is taught in schools (see Josserand 2003).

During 2014, the Association granted three IPA Student Awards to student members participating in phonetics conferences. The recipients of the Awards were Martin Kohlberger of Leiden University for participation in Sound Change in Interacting Human Systems (University of California, Berkeley, USA), Caroline Sigouin of Université Laval (Québec, Canada) for participation in 30es Journées d’études sur la parole (Le Mans, France), and Valerie Freeman of the University of Washington for participation in NWAV 43 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) in Chicago. Congratulations to these student members.

The following is a list of the countries of the current membership of the Association, based on the Association's records in November 2014. The numbers in parentheses indicate the total number of members per country (Life, Full, and Student combined). There are a total of 370 members from 49 countries. Individual members’ names are no longer published.

In November–December 2014, elections were held to choose twenty members of the Association's Council to serve from 2015 to 2019.

The IPA certificate exam will be offered in connection with ICPhS in Glasgow, on Sunday 9 August 2015. It will also be offered in London (at UCL) twice, on Wednesday 20 May 2015 and Tuesday 1 September 2015. (All offerings are subject to confirmation, requiring a sufficient number of entrants.)

The 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences was held in Glasgow, Scotland, on 10–14 August 2015. It was jointly organized by the University of Glasgow, Queen Margaret University, University of Strathclyde, and the University of Edinburgh. In total, 774 presentations covered a wide variety of topics in phonetic sciences. These included 4 plenary sessions, 10 discussant sessions where 40 papers plus 10 discussions were presented, and 720 papers in regular sessions consisting of 345 oral presentations and 375 poster presentations. Over the five days, 978 delegates attended the Congress, including co-authors and those who did not present a paper. Contributions came from 46 countries. Two hundred and twenty-nine reviewers took part in the double-blind review of the Congress papers. Eight satellite meetings were also held. The Association warmly thanks the organizers for all their work, and all who attended, together making the Congress a great success.