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.

Hakka Chinese is also known in China as Kejia dialect. The present study is based on phonetic data collected from native speakers of Hakka Chinese, male and female, aged between 18 and 22, during our field trips to Hakka-speaking Meixian County in the northeastern part of Guangdong Province in southeastern China in 2007. The speakers have lived all their life in Meijiang District of the county, speaking Meijiang variety which is considered representative of Meixian Hakka. The style of speech illustrated here is that typical of the educated younger generation and the recording is that of a 22-year-old male college student.

RALPH L. VANDERSLICE, who contributed to many areas of phonetics, died on 24 August 2008, aged 78, in Portland, Oregon. He was born on 2 January 1930 in South Bend, Indiana. He received his B.A. and his M.Sc. in speech and theatre from Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) in 1951 and 1954, respectively. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Vermont and Hawai'i. He moved to UCLA where, in 1968, he obtained his Ph.D. His dissertation, Synthetic Elocution (http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclaling/wpp/No8/), was an exploration of the character and some of the specifics of the rules that would be necessary to implement the prosodic aspects of synthesized speech produced by a reading machine. Peter Ladefoged was the chair of his dissertation committee and Victoria Fromkin one of the other members. While still a student at UCLA Ralph Vanderslice was an expert witness testifying against the validity of ‘voiceprints’ (the use of spectrographic displays of speech to identify suspects in criminal trials). He was very much a ‘hands-on’ person, skilled in many of the mechanical and electronic arts, one manifestation of this being his invention of the ‘crico-thyrometer’, a device that could track vertical larynx movement in connected speech. He subsequently taught at City University of New York and Yale University. He published many papers on speech prosody, notably ‘Binary suprasegmental features and transformational word-accentuation rules’ (1972, Language, with Peter Ladefoged). His colleagues, including this author, his office-mate in the UCLA Phonetics Lab, remember him for his erudition, wit, and generosity in helping others with everything from providing references to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works on phonetics (which he was steeped in) to repairing a shorted circuit in an amplifier. His salutary influence continues.

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.

Mavea is spoken on the eponymous island, Mavea, a satellite island off the east coast of Espiritu Santo Island, northern Vanuatu. The language is highly endangered. There are about 34 fluent speakers on Mavea Island (aged 30 and older), out of a total island population of around 210. There are at least another 30 Mavea speakers who have left the island permanently. These speakers now live throughout Vanuatu, mainly on Espiritu Santo Island (in the villages of Deproma and Matevulu), Aore Island, and in Port Vila, the capital city of Vanuatu. All Mavea speakers are bilingual in Bislama, one of the official languages of Vanuatu.

Dinka is a Western Nilotic language within the Nilo-Saharan family. There are over two million speakers (Gordon 2005). The Dinkas live along the banks of the White Nile and its tributaries in Southern Sudan. There are also communities elsewhere within Sudan, in particular in the capital Khartoum, and abroad. Cows play a key role in the Dinka economy, and also in the sociocultural system. Four major dialect areas are commonly distinguished: Padang, Rek, Agar, and Bor. The variety of Dinka represented here – Luanyjang or, as in Roettger & Roettger (1989), Luac – is part of the Rek dialect group. The term Luanyjang ‘Luac Dinka’ refers in the first place to a section within the Dinka ethnic group, and by extension also to their variety of the Dinka language. The main Luanyjang town is Wuncuei, located about 170 kilometers east of the city of Wau. Luanyjang has around 15000 speakers according to Ethnologue (Gordon 2005), although the current number is likely to be much higher.

The IPA website first went live on 25 January 1996. It was created by John Buchanan (Computing Service, University of Glasgow) and Mike MacMahon (Department of English Language, University of Glasgow). In those far-off days, over two hours could be needed to download a copy of the IPA chart – and users were warned that they would need to have at least 8MB of RAM on their computers! A revised version appeared in 2005, thanks to Jean Anderson of the STELLA Project, and Ewan MacLean, a web designer in Glasgow.