San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi (SJAO) is an underdescribed and endangered Oto-Manguean language spoken in central Mexico. This paper provides an analysis of the phonology of tonal contrasts in SJAO and the phonetics of their realization based on pitch pattern data derived from audio recordings of citation forms of SJAO words. Each SJAO lexical word has one and only one tonal sequence – either /H/ or /HL/. This sequence is underlyingly associated with one syllable in the word. Other syllables are not specified for tone, and their phonetic realization is predictable depending on their position relative to the tonal syllable. A phonetic analysis revealed that underlyingly-tonal syllables are phonetically distinct from non-tonal syllables: those with /H/ are produced with greater vocal effort (measured by spectral tilt), and those with /HL/ are longer, louder, and bear a higher f0 (fundamental frequency), compared with non-tonal syllables. This analysis differs from previous accounts of lexical prosody in other Otomi varieties, which have either described a three-way system of high, low, and rising tones contrasting on every stem syllable, or a system where one syllable per word is assigned a stress-like ‘accent’. This difference from previous analyses suggests that there is a third possible characterization of lexical prosody for Otomi, which is appropriate for SJAO and potentially other understudied varieties.

There is no consensus on the nature, or even the existence, of Vietnamese word stress. While some authors have proposed that it is morphosyntactically conditioned (Thompson 1963, Thompson 1965, Cao 2003 [1978], Ngô 1984), others have adopted the view that it is consistently word-final (Trần 1967; Nguyễn & Ingram 2006, 2007b; Phạm 2008; Nguyễn 2010) or that it lacks stress altogether (Emeneau 1951). This is due to the elusive nature of word prominence in Vietnamese, and to the small number of studies that tackle the issue experimentally. In this paper, acoustic experiments designed to test previous hypotheses and tease apart possible types of prominence are presented. Southern Vietnamese disyllabic words with various morphosyntactic structures were recorded in controlled environments to test for stress and phrasal effects. Their duration, mean intensity, mean f0, f0 range and formants were then measured to assess word prominence. Results suggest that there is little evidence for word stress in Southern Vietnamese and that reports of final stress can be reinterpreted as phrase-final lengthening. Focus-marking strategies bring no additional evidence for the existence of stress, but they seem to be partly speaker- and tone-specific, which supports results obtained in studies of Northern Vietnamese (Michaud 2005).

This study investigated acoustic properties of the four-way contrast in Russian voiceless sibilant fricatives (/ssj ʂ ʃj/). Words with these consonants, occurring in a variety of phonetic contexts, were elicited from 10 Russian native speakers. Measurements were made of duration, centre of gravity (COG) and intensity of fricative noise, as well as of formants F1–F3 during the following vowel. The results revealed that the anterior vs. posterior contrast was clearly distinguished by COG throughout the frication period, and to a lesser degree by noise intensity. The palatalized vs. non-palatalized contrast was distinguished by F1 and (especially) F2 at the onset, the midpoint, and, in some cases, at the offset of the following vowel. The four-way contrast was thus well categorized by a combination of COG and F2–F1 differences. Fricative duration only marginally distinguished /ʃj/, commonly described as geminate, from the other consonants. Clear durational differences, however, were observed for the same consonants in different positional and stress contexts. Overall, the results of the study provide a systematic documentation of the typologically uncommon fricative contrast, while also shedding light on some facts of synchronic patterning and historical development of the fricative system of Russian.

About 35 million people around the world speak Ukrainian (Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2016). The largest populations of Ukrainian speakers outside Ukraine (more than 32 million speakers) are in Russia (c. 4.5 million), followed by Moldova (c. 0.6 million), Canada (c. 0.5 million) and the USA (c. 0.5 million). Smaller Ukrainian communities have also settled in some other countries including Kazakhstan, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Argentina, Brazil and Slovakia (Mokienko 2002). Ukrainian, alongside Russian and Belarusian, belongs to the East Slavonic languages within the Indo-European language family.

Sorbian is a West Slavic language spoken in eastern Germany, in Saxony and Brandenburg near the borders of Poland and the Czech Republic, and is recognized as an endangered language by UNESCO (Moseley 2012). It is commonly referred to as Sorbian in English, but has historically been referred to as both Wendish and Lusatian. The Sorbian speech area used to expand from its northernmost point approximately 50 km south-east of Berlin to its southernmost point approximately 8 km from the borders of the Czech Republic (Stone 1993). This area is also referred to as Lusatia (Figure 1). However, the Sorbian-speaking area continues to shrink every year and is currently much smaller than Stone (1993) describes. Upper Sorbian is currently only used in daily communication in and immediately around Budyšin (personal communication, Lechosław Jocz).

The Council of the IPA is establishing committees that will take on some of the tasks of running the Association, and will allow us to expand the kinds of projects that we can undertake.