Linking /r/ concerns words having as final phoneme in isolate pronunciation either /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ or one of the five phonemes involving a (final) central vowel /ə, ɜ, ɪə, eə, ʊə/. When any of these is followed closely by a word beginning with one of the English vowel sounds an /r/ may be heard. The Gimson 1970 treatment of this topic contains detailed comments on the limitation of the operation of this pattern in situations where many or most speakers are inhibited from applying the rule to link owing to the influence of popular conceptions of incorrectitude in regard to the uttering of /r/ where no r is represented in the traditional orthography. However, it contains no explicit reference to the dependence of the r-link on either the segmental or the prosodic environments which the words involved in the r-link provide. On the other hand, Ward 1939 and various works of Jones (1918, 1956a, 1956b, 1956c) described at some length ‘special circumstances in which a final r has no consonantal value even when the following word begins with a vowel’ (Jones 1956b : § 757). Gimson 1970 makes no reference to such cases nor to Jones's mention of them. The enquirer must therefore wonder whether there is no reference to such exceptional cases because they are no longer current or merely from pressures of space or possibly from uncertainty. Gimson's revision of the Jones 1956a text of Jones's Explanations in Jones-Gimson 1967, which makes several minor amendments, leaves the fairly lengthy treatment of linking /r/ unaltered.

In Ecuador there exists a dynamic language contact continuum between Urban Spanish and Rural Quichua. This study explores the effects of competing phonologies with an analysis of voice onset time (VOT) production in and across three varieties of Ecuadorian highland Spanish, Quichua, and Media Lengua. Media Lengua is a mixed language that contains Quichua systemic elements and a lexicon of Spanish origin. Because of this lexical-grammatical split, Media Lengua is considered the most central point along the language continuum. Native Quichua phonology has a single series of voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, and /k/), while Spanish shows a clear voicing contrast between stops in the same series. This study makes use of nearly 8,000 measurements from 69 participants to (i) document VOT production in the aforementioned language varieties and (ii) analyse the effects of borrowings on VOT. Results based on mixed effects models and multidimensional scaling suggest that the voicing contrast has entered both Media Lengua and Quichua through Spanish lexical borrowings. However, the VOT values of voiced stops in Media Lengua align with those of Rural and L2 Spanish while Quichua shows significantly longer prevoicing values, suggesting some degree of overshoot.

Australian English /t/ has a fricative realisation in some contexts. The presence of an additional surface fricative in the language raises questions about potential merger and the maintenance of contrasts. An orthographic representation of fricated /t/ as 〈sh〉 suggests a similarity to the existing fricative /ʃ/. This paper compares the acoustic characteristics of fricated realisations of /t/ in Australian English with those of /ʃ/ and /s/, the fricatives judged most likely to be acoustically similar. The findings suggest a great degree of similarity to /ʃ/ in terms of spectral measures, with duration being the most likely perceptual means of distinguishing fricated /t/ from /ʃ/.

I am in favor of letting [h] and [ɦ] stay where they are as glottal fricatives—honorary glottal fricatives, if you like! What the preceding paper says about them is true—there tends to be noticeable glottal turbulence with [h] only occasionally, particularly before open [a]-type vowels (or after them, in languages with final [h]'s). The voiced counterpart is perhaps more likely to have some turbulent glottal flow, being, in fact breathy or whispery voice. My reason for wanting to keep [h] and [ɦ] in the chart is perhaps more phonological and practical than strictly phonetic. There are so many languages in which one or both of these sounds functions as a syllabic margin—as a term in a series of consonants—that one often wants to put them in a chart of consonants. In Caucasian languages [h] often coexists in the consonant system alongside [ʔ], and (e.g. in dialects of Agul) alongside [ʔ], [ʡ], [ħ], [ʕ], [H] and [ʢ].

Mah Meri (ãʔ məri) belongs to the Aslian branch of Mon-Khmer within the Austroasiatic family. It is classified as a Southern Aslian language, along with Semelai, Semoq Beri and Temoq (Benjamin 1976). Mah Meri is spoken by the Mah Meri ethnic group in scattered settlements along the south-west coast of the Malay peninsula stretching from Port Kelang to Bukit Bangkong, Sepang in the state of Selangor, Malaysia. The island of Sumatra lies a short distance away across the Malacca Strait. The Mah Meri language, which may have as many as 2,185 speakers, has no written tradition and is highly endangered.

We compare the vowel systems of Finnish, Mongolian (in China) and Udmurt, and illustrate the average placements of their monophthongal vowel types on F1/F2 plots. Mongolian has more vowel phonemes (12 long and 12 short ones) than Finnish (eight long and eight short) and Udmurt (seven). Some basic linguistic characteristics and key word lists of the three languages are presented. For comparison we utilise psychoacoustical F1/F2 formant charts which are fairly good approximations to the vowel space. The phoneme distances are indicated by means of circles of 1 Bark diameter centered on the mean F1/F2 points of the vowel types. This kind of representation allows one to draw conclusions about qualitative vicinity, partial overlapping or even merging of phoneme qualities on F1/F2 plots and about the necessity of further acoustic parameters for vowel differentiation. We also discuss some centralisation phenomena in the three languages.

The region of Béarn denotes the historically Romance-speaking part of the modern-day Pyrénées-Atlantiques département in south-western France. The langue d’oc or southern Gallo-Romance variety historically spoken in Béarn, commonly referred to as ‘Béarnais’, is a dialect of Gascon. This variety may also be referred to by its autoglossonym ‘Biarnés’ though the French term is the most widely used designation for the regional language. The number of Gascon speakers in south-western France increases steadily from north (Bordeaux) to south (the Pyrenees) and because Béarn is the area of linguistic Gascony with the highest recorded number of Gascon speakers (Moreux 2004), Béarnais may be considered the principal surviving dialect of Gascon, though other surviving dialects, such as ‘Gascon de Chalosse’, and ‘Landais’, are still spoken and written.

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).

This article investigates sound change in the vowels of Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand. It examines the relationship between sound changes in Māori and in New Zealand English, the more dominant language, with which Māori has been in close contact for nearly 200 years. We report on the analysis of three adult speaker groups whose birth dates span 100 years. All speakers were bilingual in Māori and New Zealand English. In total the speech of 31 men and 31 women was investigated. Analysis was done on the first and second formant values, extracted from the vowel targets. There has been considerable movement in the Māori vowel space. We find that the sound change in the Māori monophthongs can be directly attributed to the impact of New Zealand English, however the situation for the diphthongs is not so clear cut. There is some evidence that both New Zealand English monophthongs and diphthongs are impacting on the Māori diphthongs, but so too are the Māori monophthongs. We conclude that although New Zealand English has had a strong influence on Māori, there is very strong evidence that new generations of speakers of Māori are acquiring a phonemic system with its own internal parameters and consistencies.

Tera is the Hausa and English name for the Nyimatli [nimaáli] people as they call themselves, and their language. Their communities lie principally in the north and east of present-day Gombe State and in the adjoining area of Borno State in north-eastern Nigeria. There are approximately 100,000 people who speak the language as their mother tongue (Gordon & Grimes 2005: 175), many of whom also use Hausa as the local lingua franca; increasing numbers are trilingual as the result of the growing importance of English in commerce and education.

In a well-known introductory text on linguistics, Langacker maintained (1968: 161), expressing a widely held view:

Linguists do not fully understand just what constitutes stress. The best we can say is that stressed vowels are apparently different from unstressed ones in that they are of greater length, higher pitch and greater articulatory force.

In studies on English phonology it has often been pointed out that sp, st, sk present difficulties of interpretation. In by far the majority of these studies a bisegmental interpretation has been adopted, and the discussion has then turned on the identity of the second elements of these consonant clusters. Should the stop constituents be analysed as /p, t, k/, /b, d, g/, or /P, T, K/ (i.e. archiphonemes)? In the American structuralist school a /p, t, k/ analysis has usually been preferred on the basis of ‘ phonetic realism’ (e.g. Swadesh 1934, Pike 1947, Trager and Smith 1951), but it has subsequently been demonstrated that the stops after s are phonetically more similar to /b, d, g/ than to /p, t, k/ (Lotz et al. 1960, Reeds and Wang 1961, Davidsen-Nielsen 1969). In Praguean phonology, e.g. Trubetzkoy 1939, an archiphonemic solution has been advocated.

Speakers of rural accents have been said to speak more slowly than speakers of urban accents. However, there would appear to have been no previous empirical investigation of such a claim. In the study reported here, recordings were made of 12 Orkney English speakers and 12 Edinburgh English speakers, during a reading task and in conversation with the experimenter. Measurements, in syllables per second, were made of both the Speaking Rate and the Articulation Rate (i.e. the rate calculated after excision of pauses) of each speaker in reading mode and in conversation mode. Comparison of the results for the two groups revealed no tendency for the urban (Edinburgh) speakers to speak faster than the rural (Orkney) speakers. The claim that rural speakers speak more slowly than urban speakers therefore still awaits empirical support. Some discussion is offered concerning the possible relationships among speech tempo, lifestyle and accent.

Komi-Permyak (Finno-Ugric) has a typologically rare contrast between palatal stops and palatal affricates; the latter are also contrastive with postalveolar affricates. In addition, the language has a relatively uncommon three-way place contrast among sibilant fricatives. This paper investigates acoustic properties of the Komi-Permyak voiceless coronal obstruents in different positional contexts. An acoustic analysis of data from six native speakers of the language revealed that the contrasts were well differentiated by a combination of duration, noise intensity, spectral shapes, and vowel transitions – consistently with previous studies of similar consonants in other languages. The results also showed some positional differences in the realization of the consonants. Overall, the study contributes to a better understanding of phonetic implementation of marked phonological contrasts and positional variation; it also provides an acoustic record of the endangered language.

This paper focuses on two types of voiceless nasal sounds in Xumi, a Tibeto-Burman language: (i) the voiceless aspirated nasals // [] and // [], and (ii) the voiceless nasal glottal fricative []. We provide a synchronic description of these two types of sounds, and explore their similarities and differences. Xumi voiceless nasal consonants are described with reference to the voiceless nasal consonants // and // in Burmese and Kham Tibetan because Burmese voiceless nasals are the best described type of voiceless nasals, and are therefore used as a reference point for comparison; voiceless nasals in Kham Tibetan, which is in close contact with Xumi, represent a characteristic regional feature. The synchronic description is based on acoustic and aerodynamic measurements (the total duration of the target phonemes, the duration of the voiced period during the target phonemes, mean nasal and oral flow). Our study (i) contributes to a better understanding of voiceless nasals as a type of sound, (ii) provides a first-ever instrumental description (acoustic and aerodynamic) of the voiceless nasal glottal fricative [], as attested in a number of Tibeto-Burman languages of Southwest China, and (iii) suggests a possible phonetic basis for the observed dialectal and diachronic variation between voiceless nasals and [] in some Tibeto-Burman languages.

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.

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a critically endangered language from Peruvian Amazonia and one of the two members of the Kawapanan linguistic family. Most of its nearly 30 remaining fluent speakers live in and around the village of Jeberos (District of Jeberos, Province of Alto Amazonas, Loreto Region), at approximately 5° S, 75° W.

The documentation of Shiwilu is scarce and no survey grammar is available. Until very recently, the only trained linguist who had worked on Shiwilu was John Bendor-Samuel, who carried out fieldwork in 1955–1956 and completed a doctoral thesis in 1958 (see Bendor-Samuel 1981 [1958]). An abridged version of the thesis, which includes an outline of the phonology, was published as Bendor-Samuel (1961). Whereas recent publications have focused on the social position of the Shiwilu language (Valenzuela 2010), morpho-syntactic aspects (Valenzuela 2011), and a formal demonstration of its family affiliation with the Shawi language (a.k.a. Chayahuita) (Valenzuela Bismarck 2011), the present article is the first account of its sound system since the work by Bendor-Samuel.

The Kunama are a people of western Eritrea. Kunama (/ku1naa23ma2/) is their selfname, and they call their language /ku1naa23ma1 au23ra2/ or /ki1naa23ma1 ɲeel23a2/ but this is usually referred to by Western scholars simply as ‘Kunama’. It is a language of the Nilo-Saharan phylum, though its family affiliations within that phylum are still a matter of debate; cf. Bender 1989; Ehret 1989. Overall, Kunama has approximately 100,000 speakers. It comprises seven lects (John Abraha Ashkaba 1999), the most widely known of which are Barka (/ba2ka2/) and Marda (/mar2da32/). The present work is based on the latter, though the differences between these two lects is not very great.

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 majority of studies on phonation types have focused on low vowels due to the minimal effects of their first formant on harmonic amplitude. In studies of multiple vowel qualities, reports on the relationship between vowel and voice quality are mixed: some show similar formant frequencies across phonation types (e.g. Abramson, Nye & Luangthongkum 2007, Khan 2012), while others show different formant frequencies depending on voice quality (e.g. Ren 1992, Kuang 2011). Results differ as to whether the degree of non-modal phonation varies (Andruski & Ratliff 2000, Kuang 2011) or does not vary (Esposito 2012, Khan 2012) across different vowel qualities. The present study draws on innovations which allow for more accurate corrections for the effects of formant frequencies on spectral measures (i.e. Hanson 1995, Iseli, Shue & Alwan 2007) to examine the relationship between vowel quality and voice quality, in eight languages – !Xóõ, Burmese, Gujarati, Jalapa de Díaz Mazatec, Mon, Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec, White Hmong, and Yi. While no significant difference in the degree of non-modal phonation due to vowel quality was found, results showed a crosslinguistic pattern in the relationship between vowel quality and voice quality: vowels with higher log(F1) and log(F2) values tended to be produced with creakier phonation, while vowels with lower log(F1) and log(F2) values tended to be produced with breathier phonation, but only on the measure H1*-H2*.