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.

The results of a spectrographic study of the Kabardian vowel system confirm reports in the literature that phonetic vowel quality in Kabardian is determined by the preceding consonant. The data further show that there are three distinct phonetic categories along the F1 axis in the vowel space, and that the contextually determined variation in vowel coloring generally respects this division. Durationally, a correspondence was found between vowel height and duration. While the durational differences were found to be comparable to those reported in languages with contrastive vowel length, the differences were interpreted as a phonetic strategy to enhance the perceptual salience of the vertical vowel system.

There is nothing very new about the idea that speech sounds can be classified in terms of a limited number of features. Phonetic taxonomies have existed from the times of the earliest grammarians; and traditional consonant charts can be viewed as attempts to classify sounds in terms of features of place and manner of production. But with the development of the Prague school of phonology (Trubetzkoy, 1939) and the subsequent work of Jakobson and his collaborators (Jakobson, 1962; Jakobson, Fant and Halle, 1951; Jakobson and Halle, 1956) the discussion of the distinctive features of speech came to have more importance. As a result of the more recent work of Chomsky and Halle (1968), the role of distinctive features within phonological theory has become even more crucial. This paper will review the nature of phonological features in general, and will suggest a particular set of features which it might be appropriate to use in phonological descriptions of languages.

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.

Palula is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 10,000 people in the southern part of Chitral District in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. It belongs to a group of speech varieties subsumed under the heading Shina (Morgenstierne 1941; Strand 2000–2001). The speech described here is that of Ashret Valley, one of two main dialects of Palula. The transcription is based on a recording of the speech of the second author, Naseem Haider, himself a native speaker of Palula, born in 1978; his speech is typical of Ashreti, or southern, Palula.

Pitjantjatjara is a dialect of the Western Desert Language (WDL) of central Australia (Douglas 1958). The Western Desert Language is a member of the south-west Pama-Nyungan group. Together with Warnman, it forms the Wati sub-group. It is spoken by 4000–5000 people, and covers the widest geographical area of any language in Australia, stretching from Woomera in central northern South Australia, as far west as Kalgoorlie and Meekatharra and north to Balgo Hills, in Western Australia. The main dialects, which differ most in regards the lexicon but also to some extent in grammar and phonology, include Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Ngaanyatjarra, Ngaatjatjarra, Southern Luritja, Pintupi-Luritja, Kukatja, Gugarda, Ngalia, Wangkatja, Wangkatha, Manyjilyjarra, Kartutjarra and Yurlparija. It is perhaps more accurately conceived of as a dialect chain, whereby a dialect such as Pitjantjatjara is mutually intelligible with its neighbours Ngaanyatjatjarra and Yankunytjatjara, but not with dialects more distant than these, such as Kukatja and Manyjilyjarra.

This study presents a detailed acoustic analysis of phonation in voiceless obstruents in American English (AE) to investigate the acoustic consequences of the laryngeal timing that has been reported in the literature. The current study examines the appearance of phonation in voiceless obstruents in a corpus of read speech with 37 AE speakers. Linguistic factors such as phrase and word position, stress, and the preceding phoneme are examined and are shown to condition the presence and degree of phonation during the constriction period of stops and fricatives. The amount of phonation present is further analyzed by characterizing where in the constriction interval phonation appears. Carryover phonation (or bleed) from a preceding sonorant is most common for stops, while a trough pattern (phonation that dies out and then begins again before the end of the closure) is more prevalent for fricatives. These acoustic patterns, together with previous reports of laryngeal articulation and air pressure measures, have implications for the representation of laryngeal timing in a gestural phonology framework.

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.

Salasaca Quichua (ISO 639-3=qxl) is a Quechuan language, specifically of the branch referred to as Quechua A (Parker 1963), as Quechua IIB (Torero 1974), or the northern group (Landerman 1991); but see Landerman (1991) and Adelaar (2004) regarding doubts with respect to the classification of the different varieties. The variety described in this paper is spoken by approximately 12,000 people in Ecuador. The Salasaca ‘parroquia’ (Spanish usage in Ecuador of this word is for a non-religious administrative district), in Pelileo canton, in Tungurahua province, is divided into eighteen communities and Quichua is spoken in all of them. This variety is similar to that of others of the region and is included in the Stark & Muysken (1977) dictionary. Varieties of Quechua in this area do not have the more open allophones attested farther south (such as in Peru), and for that reason the Ecuadorian varieties are traditionally called ‘Quichua’ rather than ‘Quechua’.

The Brahmin dialect of Tamil (Dravidian) has an unusual inventory of five distinctive liquid sounds: plain and retroflex rhotics, and plain and retroflex laterals, and a fifth liquid which has been variously described as a rhotic, a lateral, a glide and/or a fricative. This paper investigates the articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual properties of these liquids, and, in particular, the fifth liquid. Electropalatography (EPG) and static palatography were used to examine the articulatory properties of the liquids, the acoustic properties of the liquids were examined, and we tested the intelligibility of the EPG recordings in a perception experiment. Our intent is to propose a classification for the fifth liquid based on these studies. The fifth liquid is classified as a retroflex central approximant, with characteristics that make it distinct from the other liquids along three dimensions of contrast: static ∼ dynamic, central ∼ lateral and retroflex ∼ non-retroflex.

The goal of this paper is to compare the degree of anticipatory and carryover phenomena in the behaviour of the velum during the production of French spontaneous speech, and to compare the data with the same speech material, but read. Airflows through the nose and the mouth were taken as an indirect indication of the velum behaviour. French is a language of special interest because there is a phonological contrast between oral and nasal vowels. The results show a tendency for nasal airflow to start before the nasal and a strong propensity to spread after the nasal. No differences could be established between speaking styles (spontaneous vs. read speech) regarding nasal airflow anticipation and carryover.

In Spanish, /b, d, [vvplosive]/ are usually spirantized to voiced approximants in all syllabic contexts after a continuant sound. However, in North-Central Peninsular Spanish (NCS), spirantization interacts with coda devoicing, yielding voiceless fricatives. In the majority of cases, coda /b, d, [vvplosive]/ occur in stressed syllables. This work examines whether or not stress is a factor in the likelihood of frication and devoicing of coda /b, d, [vvplosive]/ in this dialect. An acoustic study was conducted of nine native speakers from NCS. These speakers were tested on nonce words with /b, d, [vvplosive]/ in coda position in both stressed and unstressed syllables. Measurements were made of vowel and consonant duration, presence and absence of frication and voicing, and voicing duration. The results show that frication is more likely in stressed syllables than in unstressed syllables. This suggests that in stressed syllables, a higher subglottal pressure produces higher airflow across the glottis, thereby favoring frication. In turn, frication inhibits voicing due to conflicting aerodynamic requirements between the two. We conclude that stress is a factor in spirantization and that it may indirectly affect the voicing properties of /b, d, [vvplosive]/.

Tilquiapan Zapotec is an Otomanguean language spoken in the town of San Miguel Tilquiapan, in the Oaxaca Valley, in the central part of that state, in southern Mexico (see Merrill 2005). There are about 2700 speakers according to the government census (INEGI 2000), though town authorities (p.c. 2004) suggest that about 7000 is a more accurate assessment of the population. The Zapotec language spoken in Tilquiapan is distinct from that of any other town, although nearby Santa Inez Yatzeche has 80–90% intelligibility with Tilquiapan, according to recorded text testing (Weathers 1973, Persons et al. 1985). With respect to sociolinguistics and language attitudes, speakers in Santa Inez and Tilquiapan recognize the close relationship, though people from each town tend to say that those from the other ‘talk funny’.

Hasselt is the capital of the Belgian province of Limburg, with a population of some 68,000. The town is situated in the northern part of Belgium, about 35 km west of the national border between Belgium and the Netherlands, and 20 km north of the Dutch-French language border, which separates Belgium into a northern part (Flanders) and a southern part (Wallonia). The dialect of Hasselt belongs to the West-Limburgian dialect group (Goossens 1965). The number of dialect speakers is steadily diminishing, and the remaining ones are all bilingual with Standard Belgian Dutch (cf. Verhoeven 2005). An early comprehensive description of this dialect is given by Grootaers & Grauls (1930). The only available dictionary is Staelens (1989).

Lakota (Siouan) has both contrastive and coarticulatory vowel nasality, and both nasal and oral vowels can occur before or after a nasal consonant. This study examines the timing and degree patterns of acoustic vowel nasality across contrastive and coarticulatory contexts in Lakota, based on data from six Lakota native speakers. There is clear evidence of both anticipatory and carryover nasal coarticulation across oral and nasal vowels, with a greater degree of carryover than anticipatory nasalization. Nasality in carryover contexts is nonetheless restricted: the oral–nasal contrast is neutralized for high back vowels in this context and realized for three of the six speakers in low vowels. In the absence of nasal consonant context, contrastive vowel nasalization is generally greatest late in the vowel. Low nasal vowels in carryover contexts parallel this pattern (despite the location of the nasal consonant before the vowel), and low nasal vowels in anticipatory contexts are most nasal at the start of the vowel. We relate the synchronic patterns of coarticulation in Lakota to both its system of contrast and diachronic processes in the evolution of nasality in Lakota. These data reflect that coarticulatory patterns, as well as contrastive patterns, are grammatical and controlled by speakers.

The Xumi 旭米 language (/EPʃʉ-hĩ ketɕɐ/ ‘the language of the Shu people’) is spoken by approximately 1,800 people who reside along the banks of the Shuiluo River (水洛河) in Shuiluo Township (水洛乡) of Muli Tibetan Autonomous County (木里藏族自治县; smi li rang skyong rdzong in Written Tibetan, hereafter, WT). This county is located in the South-West of Sichuan Province (四川省) in the People's Republic of China (see Figure 1).

Among phoneticians, the Vocal Profile Analysis (VPA) is one of the most widely used methods for the componential assessment of voice quality. Whether the ultimate goal of the VPA evaluation is the comparative description of languages or the characterization of an individual speaker, the VPA protocol shows great potential for different research areas of speech communication. However, its use is not without practical difficulties. Despite these, methodological studies aimed at explaining where, when and why issues arise during the perceptual assessment process are rare. In this paper we describe the methodological stages through which three analysts evaluated the voices of 99 Standard Southern British English male speakers, rated their voices using the VPA scheme, discussed inter-rater disagreements, and eventually produced an agreed version of VPA scores. These scores were then used to assess correlations between settings. We show that it is possible to reach a good degree of inter-rater agreement, provided that several calibration and training sessions are conducted. We further conclude that the perceptual assessment of voice quality using the VPA scheme is an essential tool in fields such as forensic phonetics but, foremost, that it can be adapted and modified to a range of research areas, and not necessarily limited to the evaluation of pathological voices in clinical settings.

In this paper we will discuss some phonetic differences that are found in the production of diphthongs. The study is of a limited scope and may be considered a pilot study. The kinds of questions that will be addressed have to do with the specification of timing in speech production. Are the vowel elements of diphthongs joined in language-specific ways, or can they be joined by more general principles, such as the assumption of a fairly constant transition duration, so that the transition rate will be faster if the distance between onset - and offset - vowels is greater? This kind of principle was proposed by Kent and Moll (1972) for some types of vowel-to-vowel sequences. Or does the duration of the transition lengthen as the distance of the transition increases, keeping the transition rate fairly constant? If any of these principles are at work, then their effects will show up acoustically in the transition duration, particularly of F2. If the Kent and Moll principle is applicable, it would for example operate as a tendency towards similar F2 transition durations in different languages for the ‘same’ diphthongs.

Pitjantjatjara is an Australian language with five stop places of articulation /pt ʈ ck/ in three vowel contexts /aiu/. We present word-medial stop burst data from nine speakers, examining duration, formant, spectral moment and spectral tilt measures. Our particular focus is on the apical contrast (alveolar /t/ vs. retroflex /ʈ/) and on the alveo-palatal /c/ vs. velar /k/ contrast. We observe differences between the palatal and the velar depending on vowel context, and we discuss the possible aerodynamic and acoustic sources for these differences. By contrast, we find that differences between the alveolar and the retroflex are minimal in all three vowel contexts. Unexpectedly, in the context of /i/, various spectral measures suggest that the articulatory release for the retroflex /ʈ/ is in fact more anterior than the release for the alveolar /t/ – we discuss this result in terms of possible articulatory overshoot of the target for /ʈ/ before /i/, and suggest that this result provides additional explanation for the cross-linguistic rarity of retroflexes in an /i/ vowel context.