This description of the vowel system of Standard Dutch (ABN)—based on recordings of a sample of ten ABN speakers—is complementary to our survey of the consonant system (Mees and Collins, 1982) and has similarly developed out of work undertaken for the authors' contrastive study of Dutch and English (Collins and Mees, 1981). The term ABN (Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands) is explained in Mees and Collins (1982: 2).

A. J. Ellis's encyclopaedic work On Early English Pronunciation (henceforth EEP) now receives remarkably little serious attention from linguists. This has not always been the case. As long ago as 1877 Sweet hailed EEP as a ‘great work’ which ‘inaugurated the scientific historical study of English pronunciation.’ (viii) Other commentators admittedly have not been so complimentary. Wright, discussing the transcription of dialects in Part V of EEP, was prompted to write that ‘If his rendering … of other dialect speakers is as inaccurate as that of the Windhill dialect, the value of these tests for phonetic and philological purposes is not very great.’ (1892: 174) Orton (1949) found the work ‘defective and unreliable’. Dieth (1946) was equally critical.

This article originated as a paper given to the Colloquium of British Academic Phoneticians in September 1978. That was based on an auditory-cum-proprioceptive investigation of some 200 ‘interesting voices’, taped from radio, TV and from some early jazz-records made available by Mr. P. Gras of Dutch radio.

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.

Studies of Welsh have generally relied upon traditional accounts of the phonetics of the language, in terms of descriptions of articulation with little reference to instrumental investigation (e.g. S. Jones, 1926; Morris-Jones, 1913; Arwyn Watkins, 1961; and most of the unpublished dialect studies presented as theses to the University of Wales). However, certain instrumental studies of Welsh phonetics do exist, although their number and range of topics is limited.

‘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).

In a previous article (Kenning, 1979) I presented a description of French intonation within a similar framework to that used by Halliday (1967, 1970) and El-Menoufy (1969) in their studies of English intonation. In the present paper I want to compare English and French with regard to the third set of choices recognized by the studies: TONAL choices. After a few general remarks I shall discuss first the shapes and meanings of the formal categories called tones, then the way in which these categories are expounded phonetically.