Polish is a West Slavonic language with about 41 million speakers in Poland and approximately 10 million in diasporas. It can be described as a ‘consonantal’ language, in two respects: (a) it has a rich system of consonant phonemes, as shown in the table, and (b) it allows heavy consonant clusters, especially word-initially.

The style of speech illustrated is that typical of the educated younger generation in Beijing. The recording is that of a 25-year-old female graduate student who has lived all her life in Beijing.

Kalabari-Ijo (hereafter, Kalabari) is one of the four lects of the KOIN group of East Ijo of the Ijo language cluster in the Niger-Congo phylum (Williamson & Blench 2000: 22). The other lects in this group are Kirike (Okrika), Ibani and Nkoroo. Kirike and Ibani are mutually intelligible with Kalabari, and Nkoroo is partially so. All the lects in this group are spoken in Rivers State, Nigeria. In addition, there are three other groups of Ijo: Nembe-Akaha (Akassa) in East Ijo, Inland Ijo (Oruma, Akita (Okordia), Biseni) and Izon, which together make up West Ijo. These groups are all spoken in Bayelsa State, Nigeria, with Izon spreading further to the west (Williamson, p.c.).

Spanish is by far the most widely spoken Romance language, used by about 350 million people mainly in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. The language variety described below is formal Spanish spoken in Castile (Central Spain) by educated middle-aged speakers.

As Ladefoged (1999) points out in his description of American English, there is considerable diversity in the phonetic characteristics of English spoken in North America, such that the commonly used phrase ‘General American English’ is not entirely meaningful. The description of American English provided by Ladefoged was based on a southern California dialect. The purpose of this report is to augment that account with a brief description of southern Michigan speech patterns. According to Labov and colleagues (e.g. Labov, Yeager & Steiner 1972, Labov 1994), southern Michigan, particularly in its urban areas, is part of a relatively large dialect region in the inland northeast United States called ‘Northern Cities’. According to Labov, the Northern Cities dialect cuts an irregular swath through a chain of cities in the inland northeast extending, roughly, from upstate New York (e.g. Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo), through northern Ohio (e.g. Cleveland, Toledo), southern Michigan (e.g. Detroit, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids), northwest Indiana (e.g. Gary, Hammond), northeast Illinois (e.g. Chicago, Rockford) and south-central Wisconsin (e.g. Milwaukee, Madison). Speakers from neighboring regions such as northwest Vermont, northwest Pennsylvania, and north-central/northeast Indiana appear to show some features of the dialect. Labov contends that the vowel shifts that characterize the Northern Cities dialect are observed in their most advanced forms in the largest urban areas of the region, such as Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester.

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In Memoriam

Yiddish is, since Max Weinreich's fundamental work (Weinreich 1973, 1980), referred to as a fusion language in which components of different languages form a comprehensive synthesis. As Yiddish arose in early Ashkenazic communities in German speaking territories from the 10th century onwards, German contributes the most to its component multiplicity. From the start, some Hebrew-Aramaic and Romance elements inherited from the pre-German period were incorporated in the Yiddish language and remained along with the Hebrew script – though Yiddish to this day clearly bears the marks of its genetic origin as a West-Germanic language. The migration of a large number of Jews to Eastern Europe after the pogroms of the 13th and 14th centuries gave way to an enormous influence of the Slavic speaking environment on the rising Eastern Yiddish (as opposed to Western Yiddish, being the variety of the language that was retained on German speaking territory) and hence added a fourth component. In response to the emancipation, Yiddish lost ground in the Western sphere and substantially disappeared in Germany at the end of the 18th century, whereas in Eastern Europe, the number of Yiddish speakers increased rapidly, and gradually the language became regionally differentiated. The pre-war Eastern Yiddish speaking territory may be divided as follows: Northeastern Yiddish (Lithuania, Latvia and Belorussia), Southeastern Yiddish (Ukraine, Rumania and Eastern Galicia) and Central Yiddish (Poland and Western Galicia). The great migratory movements at the turn of the century spread the Yiddish language to the far corners of the earth, with several vernaculars being the source of a fifth component. The persecutions and the genocide through the Nazi-regime led to the annihilation of a vast number of Yiddish speakers, all but completely destroying the language in its historical territory and giving proportionally more importance to the rapidly evolving varieties of the new emigration countries.

Tyneside English (TE) is spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city of around 260,000 inhabitants in the far north of England, and in the conurbation stretching east and south of Newcastle along the valley of the River Tyne as far as the North Sea. The total population of this conurbation, which also subsumes Gateshead, Jarrow, North and South Shields, Whitley Bay, and Tynemouth, exceeds 800,000. The transcription is based on the speech of a 24-year old speaker who has lived all of her life in the Tyneside area, mostly in the Walker area of Newcastle. It should be noted that there is considerable phonetic variation in TE as a function of speaker age, sex and socioeconomic class, such that some of the features discussed in this illustration do not apply to the speaker in question; conversely, the speaker uses certain pronunciations which are not necessarily representative of the TE-speaking community as a whole (see Docherty & Foulkes 1999, Watt & Milroy 1999, Watt 2000).

In March 2003, ten additional members of the new Council of the International Phonetic Association were elected. They are: Nina Grønnum, Michael K.C. MacMahon, Janet Fletcher, Katerina Nicolaidis, Didier Demolin, Olle Engstrand, Asher Laufer, Eric Zee, Shizuo Hiki and Vincent J. van Heuven.