This paper reports an automatic data-driven analysis for describing prototypical intonation patterns, particularly suitable for initial stages of prosodic research and language description. The approach has several advantages over traditional ways to investigate intonation, such as the applicability to spontaneous speech, language- and domain-independency, and the potential of revealing meaningful functions of intonation. These features make the approach particularly useful for language documentation, where the description of prosody is often lacking. The core of this approach is a cluster analysis on a time-series of f0 measurements and consists of two scripts (Praat and R, available from https://constantijnkaland.github.io/contourclustering/). Graphical user interfaces can be used to perform the analyses on collected data ranging from spontaneous to highly controlled speech. There is limited need for manual annotation prior to analysis and speaker variability can be accounted for. After cluster analysis, Praat textgrids can be generated with the cluster number annotated for each individual contour. Although further confirmatory analysis is still required, the outcomes provide useful and unbiased directions for any investigation of prototypical f0 contours based on their acoustic form.

Northern Tepehuan (ISO 639-3: ntp) is one of the 68 native linguistic groups1 currently spoken in Mexico according to the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI 2008). As is the case with many indigenous languages, Northern Tepehuan is under serious threat of disappearance during the next decades as it is spoken by fewer than 9000 people (Carrillo 2011: 6) whose historical background has been one of social and linguistic marginalization. The Ódami – as the speakers of the language call themselves – live in the alpine valleys of an isolated region known as Sierra Tarahumara, a section of the Sierra Madre Occidental, in Chihuahua State, Mexico. Saucedo Sánchez de Tagle (2004: 6–9) indicates that the heart of the current Ódami territory is in some sections of the Guadalupe y Calvo municipality, in the southernmost tip of Chihuahua (see Figure 1) but speakers also can be found in the surrounding municipalities of Balleza, Guachochi and Batopilas. Approximately 80% of Northern Tepehuan speakers live in small villages and rural settlements around the population nuclei of Baborigame, Nabogame, Llano Grande, Barbechitos and El Venadito (Saucedo Sánchez de Tagle 2004: 7). There are also some scattered speakers living in the region’s big cities of Chihuahua and Hermosillo.

Japanese moraic nasal /N/ is a nasal segment having the status of an independent mora. In utterance-medial position, it is realized as a nasal segment sharing the same place of articulation as the immediately following segment, but in utterance-final position, it is believed to be realized as a uvular nasal. This final-/N/-as-uvular view, which is wide-spread in the literature on Japanese phonetics and phonology, was examined objectively by use of a real-time MRI movie of the articulatory movement of eleven Tokyo Japanese speakers. It turned out that the utterance-final /N/ is realized in a wide range of locations on the palate from the hard palate to the uvula. GLMM modeling showed that the closure locations of the utterance-final /N/ can be predicted accurately from the identity of the preceding vowel. In addition, leave-one-out cross validation showed that the model can be generalized to new data. We conclude that the realization of utterance-final /N/ is not fixed to uvular; its place of articulation is determined largely by the property of the preceding vowel.

Acoustic studies have shown that in Australian English (AusE), vowel length contrasts are realised through temporal, spectral and dynamic characteristics. However, relatively little is known about the articulatory differences between long and short vowels in this variety. This study investigates the articulatory properties of three long–short vowel pairs in AusE: /iː–ɪ/ beat – bit, /ɐː–ɐ/ cart – cut and /oː–ɔ/ port – pot, using electromagnetic articulography. Our findings show that short vowel gestures had shorter durations and more centralised articulatory targets than their long equivalents. Short vowel gestures also had proportionately shorter periods of articulatory stability and proportionately longer articulatory transitions to following consonants than long vowels. Long–short vowel pairs varied in the relationship between their acoustic duration and the similarity of their articulatory targets: /iː–ɪ/ had more similar acoustic durations and less similar articulatory targets, while /ɐː–ɐ/ were distinguished by greater differences in acoustic duration and more similar articulatory targets. These data suggest that the articulation of vowel length contrasts in AusE may be realised through a complex interaction of temporal, spatial and dynamic kinematic cues.

The English definite article has two major allomorphs: prevocalic /ðiː/ and preconsonantal /ðə/. Recent studies have shown changes to definite article allomorphy in some English varieties. Younger speakers, particularly from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, often use /ðə/ prevocalically rather than /ðiː/. The prevocalic definite article (PVDA) /ðiː/ facilitates management of vowel hiatus because it supports the emergence of [j] in preventing vowel adjacency (e.g. the ash [ðiːjœʃ]). An alternative strategy for separating adjacent vowels is glottalisation or glottal stop ([ðiːʔœʃ]). Few studies have explored the relationship between the vowel in the PVDA and hiatus management during the process of change. We report a diachronic analysis of Australian English (AusE) PVDA and associated hiatus management across a 50-year period (∼1960s to ∼2010s) and a synchronic analysis of present-day speakers from mainstream (MS) and non-mainstream (non-MS) (diverse) backgrounds using two read-sentence contexts. The aim is to provide insight into the process of change and factors that may influence its progression. Speech data from adolescents recorded in 1959/1960 were compared with recordings from Mainstream AusE-speaking (MS) young people recorded in the 2010s. Results showed significantly greater incidence of schwa in the PVDA and hiatus-breaking glottalisation in the modern data, particularly amongst females. The synchronic analysis comparing present-day MS and non-MS speakers showed increased use of glottalisation in females and non-MS speakers. Additionally, acoustic analysis showed more schwa-like productions in the PVDA by non-MS speakers. Of key importance in both analyses is that glottalisation was more prevalent than schwa, possibly indicating glottalisation triggered the change.

Hmong languages, particularly White Hmong, are well studied for their complex tone systems that incorporate pitch, phonation, and duration differences. Still, prior work has made use mostly of tones elicited in their citation forms in carrier phrases. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of both the vowel and tone systems of White Hmong from recordings of read speech. We confirm several features of the language, including the presence of nasal vowels (rather than derived nasalized vowels through coarticulation with a coda [ŋ]), the description of certain tone contours, and the systematic presence of breathy and creaky voice on two of the tones. We also find little evidence of additional intonational f0 targets. However, we show that some tones vary greatly by their position in utterance, and propose novel descriptions for several of them. Finally, we show that $\textrm{H}1^{\!*}$ –H2*, a widely used measure of voice quality and phonation in Hmong and across languages, does not adequately distinguish modal from non-modal phonation in this data set, and argue that noise measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) are more robust to phonation differences in corpora with more variability.

Nafsan (ISO 639-3: erk, Glottocode: sout2856), also known as South Efate, is a Southern Oceanic language of Vanuatu. It is spoken in Erakor, Eratap and Pango, three villages situated along the southern coast of the island of Efate (Figure 1) (Clark 1985, Lynch 2000, Thieberger 2006). Nafsan is also closely related to Eton, Lelepa, Nakanamanga and Namakura, spoken further to the north on Efate and some smaller neighbouring islands.1 Nafsan is often described as the southernmost member of the North-Central Vanuatu group of languages, and the Nafsan and Eton-speaking communities are noted to be at the core of ‘an unmistakable area of innovation’ compared to their northern neighbours (Clark 1985: 25). Though crosslinguistic comparisons suggest a clear boundary between North-Central Vanuatu languages and languages of the Southern Vanuatu group, there is evidence that Nafsan speakers have both linguistic and cultural links to the southern islands, suggestive of complex historical relationships between the populations of the central and southern regions (Lynch 2004; Thieberger 2007, 2015). In terms of the sound system, Nafsan is noted to be of particular interest because it ‘forms a transition between the phonologically more conservative languages to the north and the more “aberrant” languages to the south’ (Lynch 2000: 320), and exhibits phonotactic patterns which are complex and typologically uncommon, particularly among Oceanic languages (Thieberger 2006).

This paper provides an acoustic description of /z/ and /zʕ/ in Tŝilhqot’in (Northern Dene). These sounds are noted by Cook (1993, 2013) to show lenition and some degree of laterality in coda position. Based on recordings made in 2014 with a single, mother-tongue speaker of Tŝilhqot’in, we describe their acoustic properties and examine their distribution as a function of prosodic position and segmental environment. We find that they vary along three dimensions: manner (fricative–approximant), degree of retraction (non-retracted–retracted), and laterality (non-lateral–lateral). In addition, some tokens have a characteristic ‘buzziness’, which has been associated with the Chinese front apical vowel (Shao & Ridouane 2018, 2019) and the Swedish ‘Viby-i’ (Westberger 2019). We argue that ‘lenition’ (Kirchner 2004, Ennever, Meakins & Round 2017) can only account for some of the observed variation and suggest that both /z/ and /zʕ/ are specified for two tongue articulations: tongue tip/blade and tongue body (Laver 1994), encompassing laterality (and concomitant retraction) in addition to the primary coronal gesture.

The low frequency (LF) spectral analysis or ‘rhythm spectrum’ approach to the quantitative analysis and comparison of speech rhythms is extended beyond syllable or word rhythms to ‘rhetorical rhythms’ in read-aloud narratives, in a selection of exploratory scenarios, with the aim of developing a unified theory of speech rhythms. Current methodologies in the field are first discussed, then the choice of data is motivated and the modulation-theoretic rhythm spectrum and rhythm spectrogram approach is applied to the amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) of speech. New concepts of rhythm formant, rhythm spectrogram and rhythm formant trajectory are introduced in the Rhythm Formant Theory (RFT) framework with its associated methodology Rhythm Formant Analysis (RFA) in order to capture second order regularities in the temporal variation of rhythms. The interaction of AM and FM rhythm factors is explored, contrasting English with Mandarin Chinese. The LF rhythm spectrogram is introduced in order to recover temporal information about long-term rhythms, and to investigate the configurative function of rhythm. The trajectory of highest magnitude frequencies through the component spectra of the LF spectrogram is extracted and applied in classifying readings in different languages and individual speaking styles using distance-based hierarchical clustering, and the existence of long-term second order ‘rhythms of rhythm’ in long narratives is shown. In the conclusion, pointers are given to the extension of this exploratory RFT rhythm approach for future quantitative confirmatory investigations.

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).

In this Illustration we describe the Cwyzhy (also Tswydzhy) dialect of Abkhaz, the native language of the third author. In Cwyzhy, the language Abkhaz is called /арʰsаʃʷа/ [ˈаpʰsæʃᶣæ] аҧсашəа. Abkhaz (ISO-639-3 abk) belongs to the Northwest Caucasian family of languages, and the Abkhaz dialects are related as shown in (1) (adapted from Chirikba 2012: 36):

This paper presents an acoustic description of the production of the plain uvular /q/ in the speech of eight speakers of South Bolivian Quechua. While this sound patterns phonologically as a stop, its primary realization is as a voiced continuant. Variation is documented with respect to segmental and prosodic position. Segmentally, a voiced continuant is the most common realization intervocalically and after a rhotic, while a voiceless continuant is comparatively more frequent after a voiceless sibilant, and voiced stops are most common after a nasal. In post-pausal position, voiced continuant productions are still attested and are particularly common for certain speakers, suggesting that this sound category has been reanalyzed as a continuant. For other speakers, voiceless stop productions are common or preferred in post-pausal position, reflecting a standard prosodically conditioned lenition pattern. Interestingly, voiced stops also show increased frequency in post-pausal position. The production of the plain uvular is analyzed in spontaneous speech collected in an interview format, as well as in scripted speech from a word list task. A second analysis compares the realization of /q/ to the other three stops /p t k/ in the language in spontaneous speech, and finds significantly more continuant productions for /q/.

Mecapalapa Tepehua (ISO code: tee) is a language of Mexico that belongs to the Huehuetla branch of the Totonac-Tepehua linguistic family. It is spoken in the town of Mecapalapa, Puebla, Mexico. This linguistic family is composed of the Tepehua and Totonac branches (see MacKay & Trechsel 2014 and references there). The Tepehua branch consists of three main languages and their respective varieties: Pisaflores and Tlachichilco Tepehua are located in Veracruz, and Huehuetla Tepehua is located in Hidalgo and Puebla (see Figure 1). In comparison with Totonac, Tepehua has been poorly studied (see a comprehensive list of references in MacKay & Trechsel 2012). Representative works include Watters (1988), on Tlachichilco morpho-syntax with a brief phonological survey; Gutiérrez, Jiménez & García (2013), on a Tepehua-Spanish vocabulary, which is a vocabulary for the Tepehua variety spoken in Tlachichilco; MacKay & Trechsel (2013, 2018), providing detailed accounts of the phonological structures of Pisaflores and discussion of previous reconstructions of proto-Totonac-Tepehua sounds; and Kryder (1987) and Smythe (2007), offering a detailed description of Huehuetla phonology.

Francoprovençal (FP) is a highly fragmented, severely endangered, and under-documented language spoken in parts of France, Italy and Switzerland. FP spoken in the Swiss Canton of Valais has a relatively rich voiceless fricative inventory, which for some varieties includes /ɬ/. FP is therefore unusual amongst Romance languages given the presence of a phonemic lateral fricative, which is also typologically rare in the world’s languages. Moreover, voiceless lateral fricatives have been reported to display a wide range of variation in acoustic properties cross-linguistically. To date, there is very little synchronic work examining the details of both the phonology and phonetics of FP, and no published acoustic work at all on any aspect of FP’s sound system. This study provides the first acoustic investigation of one variety of FP spoken in the Valaisan commune of Nendaz, concentrating on a preliminary examination of the fricative system. We examine productions from four speakers whose data is part of a larger study into language variation and change in the region. We show that voiceless fricative categories are distinguished primarily through spectral centre-of-gravity and variance measures. Further evidence from a series of acoustic measures, including proportion of pre-voicing, relative intensity and zero-crossing ratios, suggest that /ɬ/ in FP sits between two poles: a prototypical lateral fricative and a prototypical lateral approximant. In this respect, the study’s findings corroborate observations made elsewhere, and not only contributes to the documentation and description of a lesser-studied language, but also our understanding of voiceless lateral fricative typology.

The Baima language (/pêkê/, Chinese 白马语 báimăyŭ, ISO-639 code bqh) is a little-studied Tibeto-Burman (Bodic or Himalayish) language spoken in the southwestern part of the People’s Republic of China. Approximately 10,000 people, who traditionally reside in three counties in Sichuan Province (Pingwu 平武, Songpan 松潘 (in Written Tibetan, hereafter WT, zung chu), and Jiuzhaigou 九寨沟 (WT gzi rtsa sde dgu), and in one county in Gansu Province (Wenxian 文县), speak the Baima language (see Sichuan Sheng Minzu Yanjiusuo 1980, Zeng & Xiao 1987), see Figure 1.1 The largest concentrations of Baima speakers are in Baima Township (白马乡, Baima /tôpû/) of Pingwu County, and in Tielou Township (铁楼乡) of Wenxian County.

Chukchansi belongs to the Yokuts language family (ISO 639 code: yok) ancestrally spoken in the San Joaquin valley of Central California and in the adjacent foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The headquarters of the Chukchansi tribe is located in Coarsegold and many members of the tribe live in and around Madera and Fresno counties. As shown in the map in Figure 1, there are three major territories of the Yokuts: Northern Valley Yokuts, Foothill Yokuts, and Southern Valley Yokuts. While the territory of the Chukchansi is in the foothills area, the dialect is linguistically Northern Valley (Whistler & Golla 1986), as shown in Figure 2. Yawelmani, a Yokuts language that has been a subject of extensive linguistic research (e.g. Newman 1944, Archangeli 1983, Weigel 2005), is a dialect of the Southern Valley Yokuts. It is unclear to what extent Yokuts varieties are mutually intelligible. Yokuts is often considered to be a part of a larger Penutian language family (e.g. Dixon & Kroeber 1913, Sapir 1921, DeLancey & Golla 1997). While the status of Penutian as a macro-family is disputed, Yokuts is very likely related to the Miwok and Costanoan language families of California (Callaghan 1997).

Previous work on Hong Kong Cantonese has reported evidence of an incomplete neutralization between the labialized velar /kʷ/ and plain velar /k/, where both may be produced as a plain velar [k] before /ɔ/, although non-neutralized forms are also produced to some extent for some speakers (Bauer 1982, Zee 1999, To, Mcleod & Cheung 2015). The present study examines this phenomenon acoustically, and evaluates to what extent the properties of labialization are present in the neutralizing environment. Fourteen native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese were recorded in a production experiment; these recordings were analyzed by examining formant values, duration, and rise time of intensity for vowels following target segments. Results reveal that while many acoustic differences between /kʷ/ and /k/ are maintained in the neutralizing environment, these speakers neutralize F3 and duration measures. Patterns of variation furthermore suggest that speakers utilize these acoustic properties differently, indicating greater degrees of (incomplete) neutralization for some speakers than others.