In spontaneous speech, occurrences of the same word form vary phonetically. Words that do not receive sentence accent tend to be less clearly articulated and shorter in duration in comparison to prominent words. If such an unaccented word is isolated from continuous speech, it may not even be identifiable by listeners, but as part of the speech stream, it is usually easily identified and helps the listener to perceive and organize the spoken message as a whole. Thus, the variability of unaccented words is not random but must follow certain patterns determined by context. In this study, we take a closer look at the Finnish unaccented word-like construction niinku in spontaneous conversational speech samples collected from one female Finnish speaker. We provide an analysis of the phonetic variability of the niinku structure found in the data, including such properties as segmental duration, segmental make-up, and phonetic quality. We then show what kind of properties are common to all occurrences of this unaccented construction and discuss the conditions that probably govern its acoustic-phonetic quality.

This paper provides an acoustic phonetic description of Hawai‘i English vowels. The data comprise wordlist tokens produced by twenty-three speakers (twelve males and eleven females) and spontaneous speech tokens produced by ten of those speakers. Analysis of these vowel tokens shows that while there are similarities between Hawai‘i English and other dialects, the particular combination of vowel realizations in Hawai‘i English is unique to this dialect. Additionally, there are characteristics of the Hawai‘i English vowel system that are not found in other English dialects. These findings suggest that Hawai‘i English is a unique regional variety that warrants further description.

Languages can make use of phonetic duration to signal two kinds of meanings. The first is a lexical, phonological contrast. For example, in Japanese [kata] with a short [t] means ‘frame’ and [katta] with a long [tt] means ‘bought’. This sort of contrast is usually limited to a binary distinction, and its phonetic properties have been well studied for many diverse languages. The other use of phonetic duration is to express pragmatic emphasis. Speakers of some languages can use lengthening to express emphasis, as in the English example Thank you sooooooo much. This lengthening can employ multiple degrees of duration, beyond the more standard binary contrast. This second use of duration has been understudied, and this paper attempts to fill that gap. To that end, this paper reports the first experimental documentation of the consonant lengthening pattern in Japanese, which expresses pragmatic emphasis. The results show that at least some speakers show six levels of durational distinctions, while other speakers show less clear-cut distinctions among different levels of emphatically lengthened consonants. Nevertheless, all but one speaker showed a linear correlation between duration and level of emphasis.

Tianjin Mandarin is a member of the northern Mandarin Chinese family (ISO 693-3: [cmn]). It is spoken in the urban areas of the Tianjin Municipality (CN-12) in the People's Republic of China, which is about 120 kilometers to the southeast of Beijing. Existing studies on Tianjin Mandarin have focused mainly on its tonal aspects, especially its intriguing tone sandhi system, with few studies examining the segmental aspects (on tone, see e.g. Li & Liu 1985, Shi 1986, Liu 1993, Lu 1997, Wang & Jiang 1997, Chen 2000, Liu & Gao 2003, Ma 2005, Ma & Jia 2006, Zhang & Liu 2011, Li & Chen 2016; on segmental aspects, see e.g. Han 1993a, b; Wee, Yan & Chen 2005). As also noted in Wee et al. (2005), this is probably due to the similarity in segmental structures between Tianjin Mandarin and Standard Chinese, especially among speakers of the younger generation, and what differentiates the two Mandarin varieties is most notably their tonal systems. The aim of the present description is therefore to provide a systematic phonetic description of both segmental and tonal aspects of Tianjin Mandarin, with main focus on the tonal aspects.

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).

Kalasha (ISO 639-3: kls), also known as Kalashamon, is a Northwestern Indo-Aryan language spoken in Chitral District of Khyber Pakhtunkwa Province in northern Pakistan, primarily in the valleys of Bumburet, Rumbur, Urtsun, and Birir, as shown in Figure 1. The number of speakers is estimated between 3000 and 5000. The Ethnologue classifies the language status as ‘vigorous’ (Eberhard, Simons & Fennig 2019) but some researchers consider it ‘threatened’ (Rahman 2006, Khan & Mela-Athanasopoulou 2011). Kalasha has been in close contact with Nuristani and other Northwestern Indo-Aryan languages. Among the latter, the influence of Khowar has been particularly strong because it functions as a lingua franca of Chitral District (Liljegren & Khan 2017). The Kalasha lexicon includes many loanwords from Khowar, as well as from Persian, Arabic, and Urdu (Trail & Cooper 1999). Early efforts to put the language in writing employed Arabic script but a Latin-based script was adopted in 2000 (Cooper 2005, Kalash & Heegård 2016).

Starting with an r that was already ambiguous, the IPA added new symbols and diacritics without arriving at a comprehensive treatment of rhotics. The results have been ad hoc solutions and potential confusion for languages such as Spanish, in which these need to be distinguished. A few modifications of the IPA diacritic system would suffice in order to capture the different types.

The Western dialect of Naxi has four lexical tones: High, Mid, Low and Rising; the latter is rare in the lexicon. Rising contours on monosyllables are frequent in connected speech, however, as a result of a process of syllable reduction: reduction of a morpheme carrying the High tone results in re-association of its tone to the syllable that precedes it in the sentence, creating a rising contour. An experiment (with one speaker and five listeners) establishes that there is not only one rising contour that originates in tonal reassociation, as reported in earlier descriptions, but two: Low-to-High and Mid-to-High – as could be expected by analogy with phenomena observed in Niger-Congo languages and elsewhere. A second set of experiments (same speaker; six listeners) investigates the reduction of Mid- and Low-tone syllables: they reduce to [] and [], respectively, and coalesce with the preceding syllable (in Naxi, syllabic structure is simply consonant + glide + vowel). Unlike High-tone syllable reduction, this process stops short of complete tonal de-linking. These experiments aim to provide a complete picture of syllable reduction patterns in Naxi. It is argued that the notions of floating tones and tonal reassociation can be usefully applied to the Naxi data.

As an extensive study of Hebrew and Arabic has revealed that [ʕ] is an approximant in ordinary speech, and as we have no reason to believe that [ʕ] is different in other languages, we should consider [ʕ] to represent not a fricative but a voiced pharyngeal approximant.

The Extensions to the IPA for the transcription of disordered speech and voice quality (extIPA) were approved at the 1989 IPA Congress in Kiel (see Duckworth et al. 1990, Ball 1991). A transcription system for disordered speech needs to provide sufficient diversity of symbols and diacritics to account for the majority of observed phonetic variants. Creation of standard new symbols and diacritics for every observed variant is ultimately counterproductive. We submit that the following phenomena have been observed frequently enough and have sufficient diagnostic and therapeutic implications to warrant consideration as new extensions to the IPA. We do not imply, however, that these are the only atypical speech production phenomena that may, in the long run, be worthy of inclusion in a revised extIPA, and we look forward to further suggestions from clinicians and phoneticians.

It is painful to admit neglectfulness, but I see no way around it in the following case. And better late than never. I was inattentive as I sent in my vote of approval to the outcome of the IPA 1989 Kiel Convention.

Intonation has frequently been regarded by linguists as on the periphery of linguistics. The study of grammar began in the classical era (see Robins 1967) and the study of phonetics also goes back a very long way (see, for example, Allen 1953). But intonation has not figured prominently in phonetic writings (if we exclude discussion of word phenomena like Greek accent). Most bibliographies of intonation do not go further back than the twentieth century (e.g. Ladd 1979a), two exceptions being Pike (1945) and Crystal (1969). But there are sufficient early writings on various aspects of intonation to justify a new sub-branch of the history of linguistics, the history of intonology. This article seeks to inaugurate this sub-branch by tracing the origins of a central theoretical concept in modern intonation back to the seventeenth century and ultimately to the renaissance.

Many languages have a phonological pattern of regressive voicing assimilation, according to which an obstruent is required to match a following obstruent in voicing (e.g. Russian, Sanskrit). This restriction on the distribution of categories has parallels in the phonetic fact that an obstruent has a longer interval of glottal pulsing when it occurs before a voiced sound than when it occurs before a voiceless sound. It is proposed that the phonological pattern arises diachronically through a reanalysis of the phonetic pattern, beginning with a tendency for listeners to identify an obstruent before another obstruent as matching the latter in voicing. This paper reports on two experiments designed to test premises of this account. A production study explores how obstruent voicing in English is affected by voicing in a following segment. A perception study explores how the identification of voicing categories is impacted by the acoustic effects of following segment context. It is found that listeners tend to identify a fricative as voiceless if it is drawn from the position before a voiceless obstruent, but that a following voiced segment has no significant effect on voicing class identification. Implications for the diachronic account of regressive voicing assimilation are discussed.

Phonetic aspects of many languages have been documented, though the breadth and focus of such documentation varies substantially. In this survey, phonetic aspects (here called ‘categories’) that are typically reported were assessed in three English-language collections – the Illustrations of the IPA from the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, articles from the Journal of Phonetics, and papers from the Ladefoged/Maddieson Sounds of the World’s Languages (SOWL) documentation project. Categories were defined for consonants (e.g. Voice Onset Time (VOT) and frication spectrum; 10 in total), vowels (e.g. formants and duration; 7 in total) and suprasegmentals (e.g. stress and distinctive vowel length, 6 in total). The Illustrations, due to their brevity, had, on average, limited coverage of the selected categories (12% of the 23 categories). Journal of Phonetics articles were typically theoretically motivated, but 64 had sufficient measurements to count as phonetic documentation; these also covered 12% of the categories. The SOWL studies, designed to cover as much of the phonetic structure as feasible in an article-length treatment, achieved 41% coverage on average. Four book-length studies were also examined, with an average of 49% coverage. Phonetic properties of many language families have been studied, though Indo-European is still disproportionately represented. Physiological measures were excluded as being less common, and perceptual measures were excluded as being typically more theoretical. This preliminary study indicates that certain acoustic properties of languages are typically measured and may be considered as an impetus for later, fuller coverage, but broader consensus on the categories is needed. Current and future documentation efforts would benefit these considerations being addressed.

French intonation has so far received far less attention from linguists than English intonation. What is available on the subject tends to deal with specific issues and is usually based on read prose rather than on spontaneous speech. The aim of this paper is to provide an overall picture of the intonation of ‘standard’ conversational French so that the intonational resources of French may be compared with those of English. The primary data consists of about one hour of recorded conversations; the contrasts have been identified using auditory techniques and the accuracy of the transcription and reliability of the descriptive statements have been checked by analysing the corpus instrumentally with a mingograf.

Electropalatographic data on the frequency of occurrence of assimilatory processes in Catalan C1##C2 sequences, where ## is inserted at the boundary between two consecutive words, reveal that regressive place assimilations operate more often on C1 = /n/ than on C1 = /t/ and are triggered by /ɡ/ rather than by the labials /pbm/ and the voiceless velar stop /k/. Regressive manner assimilations involving nasality and laterality are facilitated by homorganicity between the two consecutive consonants and thus apply more frequently in the clusters /pmtntltʎ/, where C1 and C2 share the same labial or dentoalveolar place of articulation, than in the sequences /pntmkmkn/, where the two consonants are heterorganic; on the other hand, /k/ is less prone than /pt/ to become nasal when followed by /mn/. Place assimilatory processes apply more often for some speakers than for others, and their frequency of occurrence increases whenever C1 is embedded in a frequent or function word. The articulatory motivation for some of these place and manner assimilatory processes, and the extent to which they are complete or partial, are also investigated.

We examined the production of the Irish initial mutation eclipsis in two speaking styles. In initial mutation phenomena, a word appears with a different initial sound depending on the lexical or morphosyntactic environment (e.g. croí [kɾɣi] ‘(a) heart’ (radical form), (a) chroí [xɾɣi] ‘(his) heart/darling’ (séimhiú-lenition form), and (a) gcroí [ɡɾɣi] ‘their heart/darling’ (eclipsis form)). The goals of the study were:

1. (i) to examine whether there are acoustic differences between the initial consonants of radical word forms (e.g. [ɡ] of gruig ‘(a) frown/scowl’) and the corresponding consonants of eclipsis forms (e.g. [ɡ] of gcroí), as has been found for similar phenomena in other languages;

2. (ii) to examine variability in the patterns of initial mutation in the speech of present-day speakers of Irish.

Our analyses offer limited evidence that there may be phonetic differences between radical and corresponding eclipsis consonants, but the current data do not allow us to rule out alternative explanations. The realization of initial mutations in semi-spontaneous speech differed dramatically both from that of read speech and from the expectations of the traditional grammar. The results suggest that the realization of eclipsis and other initial mutations may be style- or register-dependent. We also found some evidence that it may vary by consonant type, in part due to phonological frequency patterns of the language.