Central Sama (ISO code sml) is spoken in the Philippines throughout the Sulu Archipelago and the Sibuguey Gulf to the north, and in many scattered communities as far north as Manila Bay. In Sabah, Malaysia, it is spoken primarily in the districts of Semporna and Kunak. For more information regarding the classification of this language within Austronesian, see Gordon (2005).

Sumi (also known by its exonym ‘Sema’) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nagaland, North-east India. It is one of the major languages of the state, with an estimated 242,000 speakers living primarily in Zunheboto district, as well as in the major cities of Kohima and Dimapur. Bradley (1997) places Sumi (referred to as Sema), among the ‘Southern Naga’ languages, which include Angami (also known as Tenyidie) and Ao, in contrast to the ‘Northern Naga’ languages such as Konyak and Nocte. Burling (2003) offers a more conservative classification, placing Sumi (referred to as Simi) in an ‘Angami-Pochuri’ group containing Angami, Chakhesang (Chokri and Kheza) and Mao. Four main dialects of Sumi have been identified: the Western dialect, the Eastern dialect, the Chizolimi dialect, and the Central dialect. The Central dialect is the standard dialect used in published works of Sumi (Sreedhar 1976: 4–5).

Tausug (ISO code tsg) is an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Jolo in the southwestern Philippines. It is also found on other nearby islands in the southwestern part of the Philippines and in parts of Sabah, Malaysia, where it is called Suluk. The population of the Tausug in the Philippines is estimated at 900,000 (Gordon 2005) and the year 2000 population estimate of the Suluk in Sabah, Malaysia, is 150,000. The following description is based on the variety spoken on Jolo. ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ text was translated from English into Tausug by Irene Hassan. Previous studies of Tausug phonology include Asmah (1978, 1983) and Hassan, Ashley & Ashley (1994). David Lao, age 62 at the time of the recording, born in Jolo, Philippines, was the reader for the Tausug words in this article. Due to difficult access into the language area, all audio recordings were obtained by Skype transmission.

The variety described here is representative of colloquial Assamese spoken in the eastern districts of Assam. Assam is a North-Eastern state of India, therefore Assamese and creoles of Assamese like Nagamese are spoken in the different North-Eastern states of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and also the neighbouring country of Bhutan. Approximately 15 million people speak Assamese in India (see Ethnologue, Gordon 2005, which lists 15,374,000 speakers including those in Bhutan and Bangladesh). In the pre-British era (until 1826), the kingdom of Assam was ruled by Ahom kings and the then capital was based in the Eastern district of Sibsagar and later in Jorhat. American missionaries established the first printing press in Sibsagar and in the year 1846 published a monthly periodical Arunodoi using the variety spoken in and around Sibsagar as the point of departure. This is the immediate reason which led to the acceptance of the formal variety spoken in eastern Assam (which roughly comprises of all the districts of Upper Assam). Having said that, the language spoken in these regions of Assam also show a certain degree of variation from the written form of the ‘standard’ language. As against the relative homogeneity of the variety spoken in eastern Assam, variation is considerable in certain other districts which would constitute the western part of Assam, comprising of the district of Kamrup up to Goalpara and Dhubri (see also Kakati 1962 and Grierson 1968). In contemporary Assam, for the purposes of mass media and communication, a certain neutral blend of eastern Assamese, without too many distinctive eastern features, like /ɹ/ deletion, which is a robust phenomenon in the eastern varieties, is still considered to be the norm. The lexis of Assamese is mainly Indo-Aryan, but it also has a sizeable amount of lexical items related to Bodo among other Tibeto-Burman languages (Kakati 1962), and there are a substantial number of items borrowed from Hindi, English and Bengali in recent times.

As a western Slavic language of the Indo-European family, Czech is closest to Slovak and Polish. It is spoken as a native language by nearly 10 million people in the Czech Republic (Czech Statistical Office n.d.). About two million people living abroad, mostly in the USA, Canada, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and the UK, claim Czech heritage (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic 2009). However, it is not known how many of them are native speakers of Czech.

Northern Paiute is a member of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken across the Great Basin in the western United States – from Mono Lake in California, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, through western Nevada and into southeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho, as well as in a discontinuous region in southeastern Idaho by the Bannock. There are, according to Golla (2011), about 300 first-language speakers of Northern Paiute. In this illustration, we describe the language's Mono Lake variety.

Kumzari is an endangered language spoken by about 4000 people in Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. Speakers of the main dialect are found on the Musandam Peninsula of Oman and in small groups in cities along the Gulf coast of the United Arab Emirates. Laraki, a closely related dialect of the language, is spoken across the Strait of Hormuz by a single community on Larak Island in Iran (Lewis 2011, Anonby & Yousefian in press).

Vietnamese, the official language of Vietnam, is spoken natively by over seventy-five million people in Vietnam and greater Southeast Asia as well as by some two million overseas, predominantly in France, Australia, and the United States. The genetic affiliation of Vietnamese has been at times the subject of considerable debate (Diffloth 1992). Scholars such as Tabard (1838) maintained a relation to Chinese, while Maspero (1912), despite noting similarities to Mon-Khmer, argued for an affiliation with Tai. However, at least since the work of Haudricourt (1953), most scholars now agree that Vietnamese and related Vietic languages belong to the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic family.

Kera is an Eastern Chadic language spoken by about 50,000 people in southwestern Chad, south of the town of Fianga, and in major towns of Cameroon and Chad. Most Kera speakers would claim to speak a standard variety of Kera although there is some variation depending on gender and location. The differences involve the relationship between tone and voicing, the number of contrastive tones and the presence or absence of a voicing contrast. Women are more conservative than men in the use of tone in rural settings and more innovative than men in urban settings (Pearce 2009). Previous literature on Kera includes Ebert (1975, 1976, 1979) and Pearce (1999, 2006a, b, c, 2007a, 2008, 2009).

Malay (Bahasa Melayu) is a member of the Malayic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. This subgroup includes languages like Gayo in Sumatra (Eades & Hajek 2006), Minangkabau in Sumatra, and Iban in Borneo, as well as many local dialects of Malay found in Borneo, Sumatra, Peninsular Malaysia, and eastern Indonesia (Adelaar 2005).

The Judeo-Spanish speaking population of Istanbul is the result of migrations that were due to the edict of expulsion of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. The Ottoman ruler Bayezid II provided a haven to the exiles in his realm, and many came as immigrants to the capital Istanbul and other major port cities in that year. A continuous trickle of immigration of Jews originating in Spain continued after that date, as some of those who had gone to exile in other Mediterranean and Western European countries eventually also decided to resettle in Ottoman cities. Some Spanish-speaking families continued to migrate from the cities of the Italian peninsula to Istanbul and other centers of the Ottoman empire up until the eighteenth century. Another stream included Hispano-Portuguese families, Jews who had resettled in Portugal after the expulsion but were forced to undergo conversion there in 1497, and after a period of clandestine Jewish existence started emigrating to other countries in the sixteenth century. First Bayonne in France, then Amsterdam and other Hanseatic cities became important centers for Hispano-Portuguese families that returned to Judaism, and these maintained relations with, and occasionally sent immigrants to, the Jewish communities of the Ottoman cities.

Shilluk is a Western Nilotic language spoken in Southern Sudan. In the study of sound systems, the Western Nilotic languages are of particular interest on account of their rich systems of suprasegmental distinctions. For example, Dinka, another Western Nilotic language, has three levels of vowel length, a voice quality distinction (modal vs. breathy), and – depending on the dialect – three or four distinctive tone patterns (Andersen 1987, Remijsen & Manyang 2009). As we shall see, Shilluk presents a similarly complex system of suprasegmental distinctions.

Isthmus Zapotec (autoglossonym: [dìʤàˈzàˑ]) is the common name used for a variety of Zapotec (Otomanguean family) spoken on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico (Suárez 1983: xvi; Campbell 1997: 158). It is now officially listed by the Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (INALI 2008) as ‘zapoteco de la planicie costera’ (‘coastal plain Zapotec’) to distinguish it from other varieties of Zapotec spoken on the Isthmus. It is the mother tongue of many inhabitants of various cities and towns, as well as many smaller communities (INALI 2008), with some lexical, syntactic and phonetic variation between towns only a few kilometers apart. The ISO 639-3 code for this variety is zai. Since the most recent census figures do not separate out the varieties of Zapotec, and have not done so reliably when attempted, official statistics as to the number of speakers of Isthmus Zapotec are not available. (The Ethnologue (Lewis 2009) cites the 1990 census as listing 85,000 speakers; that figure must have been an interpretation of other statistics in the census.) INALI (personal communication, September 2008) estimates the current number to be about 104,000. In the city of Tehuantepec, the language is no longer widely used. In certain other locations, including Juchitán de Zaragoza, Spanish is becoming the dominant or the only language spoken by many people born after about 1990, although Zapotec is dominant in many outlying towns, including San Blas Atempa. Mature speakers have remarked that young people who are not fluent do not use tones correctly. Isthmus Zapotec has had active writers, including poets and novelists, since the first half of the twentieth century, well before an orthography was officially established (Alfabeto popular 1956), but reading and writing of the language are still not taught in schools in the region.

Slovak (sometimes also called Slovakian) is an Indo-European language belonging to the West-Slavic branch, and is most closely related to Czech. Slovak is spoken as a native language by 4.6 million speakers in Slovakia (that is by roughly 85% of the population), and by over two million Slovaks living abroad, most of them in the USA, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Canada and Great Britain (Office for Slovaks Living Abroad 2009).

Bengali ( /baŋla/) is an Indo-European language (Indic branch) spoken by over 175 million people in Bangladesh and eastern India (Dasgupta 2003: 352; Lewis 2009). The speech illustrated below is representative of the standard variety widely spoken in Dhaka and other urban areas of Bangladesh.

Orsmaal-Gussenhoven is a small village in the Belgian province of Flemish Brabant with about one thousand residents. It is located halfway between the towns of Tienen (Brabant) in the west and St.-Truiden (Limburg) in the east, and about 12 km north of the Dutch–French language border, which separates the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) from its southern part (Wallonia). No systematic description of the local dialect is available (for a toponymic study, see Kempeneers 2004). A dictionary including a short grammar is available for the dialect of Melkwezer, 2.5 km to the north of Orsmaal-Gussenhoven (Hondshoven 2003). However, the sound systems of the two dialects are not identical.

Itunyoso Trique /itunˈjoso ˈtɾiki/ is an Oto-Manguean language (Mixtecan branch) spoken in the town of San Martín Itunyoso, Oaxaca, Mexico. It is one of three Trique languages, all of which are spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. According to the 2005 census (INEGI 2005), there are 1,345 inhabitants in the town, virtually all of whom speak Itunyoso Trique as a native language. However, this number does not reflect the total number of speakers, as approximately 30%–50% of the population lives outside of San Martín Itunyoso at any given time. The population of the nearby town of Concepción Itunyoso, with a population of 261 (ibid.), is considered to speak the same dialect. The remaining populations of speakers are found in Oaxaca City, Mexico City, and the United States.

Temne belongs to the South Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo (formerly the Southern Branch of the Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo; Blench 2006, Childs 2010) spoken in the northern part of Sierra Leone. According to Ethnologue (ISO 639–3: tem, Lewis 2009), Temne has a population of about 1.2 million native speakers. Like other South Atlantic languages, Temne is a tonal language with a noun class system, prefixed noun class markers and agreeing prefixes on dependent elements. Features determining class membership include number and animacy. Temne also features extension suffixes which alter the valency or the semantic structure of simple verb stems. The basic word order is Subject–Verb–Object.

Goizueta is a small town in northwestern Navarre, Spain, bordering Gipuzkoa. According to the most recent official figures, it has slightly over 800 inhabitants, about 95% of whom speak Basque (2001, Instituto de Estadística de Navarra). All inhabitants (except for young children) also speak Spanish. In the school system standard Basque and, to a lesser extent, Spanish are used. Older speakers (those born before 1970 or so) were educated exclusively in Spanish. The local Basque dialect, however, enjoys very high prestige among its speakers, and this is the linguistic variety that is most commonly used in everyday interaction within the town.

Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric language family and is closely related to Finnish. It has about one million native speakers in Estonia and about 150,000 elsewhere in the world. In phonetics, Estonian is probably best known for its three degrees of contrastive quantity: short (Q1), long (Q2) and overlong (Q3).