The effects of language contact extend well beyond the borrowing of lexical items, and can include morphosyntactic, phonetic, and phonological changes over time (Thomason & Kaufman 1998). One especially common structural outcome of long-term contact is phonetic transfer (Matras 2009: 222). The Welsh spoken in Patagonia, which has been in close contact with Spanish for the past 150 years, offers one example of this phenomenon: Jones (1984) observes that younger speakers of Patagonian Welsh may be developing unaspirated voiceless stops /ptk/ as a result of Spanish contact. This paper measures the voice-onset time (VOT) of the Welsh voiceless stops /ptk/ using contemporary conversational speech data from both Patagonia and Wales, for speakers in three age groups (0–29, 30–59, and 60+ years), to examine the effects of Spanish contact on Patagonian Welsh. Results indicate that the tendencies seen in Jones (1984) have held true, and in fact have generalized to become a feature of Patagonian Welsh for speakers of all ages: Patagonian speakers produce the Welsh stops /ptk/ with significantly shorter VOT than speakers from Wales. These results shed light on an important distinguishing phonetic feature of this understudied variety of Welsh, as well as the dynamics of language contact in action.

Previous research has shown that pre-aspiration can be a phonemic and a variable linguistic feature susceptible to linguistic and extra-linguistic influences. In the case of Welsh, previous exploratory work has found the presence of pre-aspiration (Ball 1984, Morris 2010, Spooner 2016, Iosad forthcoming), but the phonetic and phonological properties of this feature and its sociophonetic patterning in the language are not known. This article presents analyses of the variety of Welsh spoken in Bethesda (Gwynedd). It reports the frequency of occurrence of pre-aspiration, its duration, and noisiness. As well as describing pre-aspiration, it attempts to ascertain the extent to which this feature is influenced by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Wordlist data were analysed from 16 Welsh–English bilinguals from Bethesda (Gwynedd, North Wales). Speakers were aged between 16 and 18 years old and the sample was stratified by speaker sex and home language (either Welsh or English). The results indicate that pre-aspiration is frequent in both fortis and lenis plosives (the latter of which are typically devoiced in Welsh). In addition to a number of linguistic influences on its production, both speaker sex and home language were found to be significant predictors of variation for some measures. The results are discussed with reference to previous studies of pre-aspiration in other languages and work on phonetic variation in Welsh–English bilingual speech.

IPAtranscriptor is a tool for creating narrow phonetic transcriptions. As it connects to the computer's default text-to-speech engine on demand, the program can be used not only by sighted but also by partially sighted and blind individuals. Sighted users can choose whether they prefer the mouse or the keyboard as their input device. In contrast to other programs, the full set of symbols and diacritics of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is implemented and users can produce very narrow phonetic transcriptions as they can insert up to three diacritics above and three diacritics below each IPA symbol to modify it. Furthermore, the program can facilitate the collaboration between blind and sighted phoneticians (or students of linguistics in general) since they can easily exchange their phonetic transcriptions. A conversion of the transcriptions is not necessary as all transcribers can use the same system regardless of their visual abilities. IPAtranscriptor is freely available online and is believed to be the first audio-based program for narrow phonetic transcription that can be used by blind and sighted phoneticians.

A multi-speaker acoustic study on citation tones in Kaifeng Mandarin, referred to as LH, HL, H and L, shows that L is realized as three different subtypes by different speakers, i.e. dipping, falling and falling with lengthening, while generally being longer than the other three tones and frequently spoken with creaky voice in part of the vowel. This inter-speaker variation is reflected in the different transcriptions of Kaifeng L that have been given in the literature. We argue that a L-tone is intrinsically less salient than a H-tone, due to a lack of phonetic space in the low pitch range as well as to a potential ambiguity between contextual low pitch around f0 peaks and low pitch due to L-tones, and thus more likely to be enhanced.

Seenku (ISO 639-3: sos) is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group, whose other members include languages like Dzùùngoo (Solomiac 2014), Jowulu (Djilla, Eenkhoorn & Eenkhoorn-Pilon 2004), and Duungooma (Hochstetler 1996), spoken on either side of the Mali-Burkina Faso border. The endonymic language name Seenku [sɛ̃́ː-kû] (also spelled on Ethnologue as Seeku) literally means ‘thing of the Sɛ̃ː ethnicity’, but it is widely known to outsiders as Sembla (variant spelling Sambla), which doubles as an exonym for the ethnicity. Seenku has two primary dialects, Northern and Southern, spoken in villages approximately 40 km west of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso (see map in Figure 1). This study focuses on the more populous southern dialect, particularly the variety spoken in and around the large village center of Bouendé (local name [ɡ͡béné-ɡũ̏]), with a population of approximately 12,000 speakers; the Northern dialect, spoken around the village center of Karangasso (local name [təmî]), has a population of approximately 5000 speakers and was the subject of a sketch grammar (Prost 1971). The southern dialect had until recently received little scholarly attention, with the exception of a Master's thesis on the morphophonology at the Université de Ouagadougou (Congo 2013), but is now the subject of the NSF Documenting Endangered Languages grant supporting this research (BCS-1664335). Other published work includes McPherson (2017a, b, c, d).

The Hmu language is spoken by approximately 1,250,000 people who reside in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture (黔东南苗族侗族自治州), Guizhou Province (贵州省), the People's Republic of China (Wang & Mao 1995: 3–4; Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2016).

Xiangxiang ([ɕjaŋ44 ɕjaŋ44]) is a Chinese dialect spoken by a population of 885,552 in the urban area of Xiangxiang (CN-430381), a city located in the centre of Hunan Province, China (Jiang 2008: 6). It belongs to Xiang ([ɕjaŋ44], ISO: 639-3: [hsn]), which is one of the ten major dialect groups of Chinese (LAC 2012).1 Xiang has two main subgroups, New Xiang and Old Xiang (Zhou & You 1985, Yuan 2001), and Xiangxiang is often cited as a representative dialect of Old Xiang (H. Bao 2001, Jiang 2008).2 Rather than denoting different historical stages, ‘old’ and ‘new’ reflect more and less conservative varieties among contemporary Xiang dialect speakers. Some impressionistic descriptions of the sounds and tones of Xiangxiang dialect will be found in Chao & Wu (1974), S. Zeng (2001) and Jiang (2008).

Punjabi (Western, ISO-639-3 pnb) is an Indo-Aryan language (Indo-European, Indo-Iranian) spoken in Pakistan and India, and in immigrant communities in the UK, Canada, USA, and elsewhere. In terms of number of native speakers, it is ranked 10th among the world’s languages, with more than 100 million speakers (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016). Aspects of the phonology of different varieties of Punjabi have been described in Jain (1934), Arun (1961), Gill & Gleason (1962), Singh (1971), Dulai & Koul (1980), Bhatia (1993), Malik (1995), Shackle (2003), and Dhillon (2010). Much of this literature is focused on Eastern varieties, and the phonology of Western Punjabi dialects has received relatively less attention (e.g. Bahri 1962, Baart 2003, 2014).