Implosive consonants have drawn the attention of researchers over time, partially due to their relative rarity in the world’s languages, and partially due to their unique ingressive air flow. This sound category has varying complex features from an articulatory and acoustic perspective. This study explores the sound category by analyzing the acoustic features of a language whose implosives have yet to be acoustically considered: Shimaore, a Bantu-Sabaki language spoken in Mayotte. Specifically, it compares the bilabial plosive /b/ and the bilabial implosive /ɓ/ in terms of Voice Onset Time (VOT), fundamental frequency, amplitude, and voice quality via H1*–H2*, harmonics-to-noise ratios (HNR), and cepstral peak prominence (CPP). Analyses show that VOT is shorter for implosives than for plosives. At oral closure and vowel onset, amplitude and f0 are higher than plosives. H1*–H2* values read alongside HNR and CPP values suggest that implosives in Shimaore have glottal constriction. Some individual differences are explored for question of variation in implosives. Implications regarding sociophonetic studies in Mayotte as well as general implications for implosives are discussed.

Chinese languages have a set of segments known as apical vowels, which have been analysed in previous studies as either genuine vowels, fricative vowels, fricative consonants, or approximants. This study is concerned with the apical vowel attested in Jixi-Hui Chinese. We examine this segment from acoustic and articulatory perspectives and argue that it is best defined as a fricative /z/. Phonologically, Jixi-Hui Chinese /z/ is a distinct phoneme that is exclusively attested in syllable nucleus position where it constitutes a tone-bearing unit and which can undergo tonal sandhi processes. It can appear not only after coronal sibilants /s ts tsʰ/, but also after bilabials /p pʰ/ and nasals /m n/. Acoustically, we show that this segment contains frication noise in its initial phase in the majority of cases, with a formant structure towards its end. The analysis of the zero-crossing rate confirms this significant presence of noise, clearly distinguishing this segment from genuine vowels. Furthermore, articulatory analyses of ultrasound data show that /z/ has a near-identical tongue shape to fricative /s/ on both mid-sagittal and coronal planes, in both sibilant and non-sibilant contexts. These findings are viewed in light of the variability in the way /z/ is phonetically implemented in Jixi-Hui Chinese.

What does the symbol r mean when it is used in a transcription? Here we analyze the use of the symbols for the alveolar trills (r) and taps () among the Illustrations of the IPA since 1971. We begin by sketching the history of the various symbols and conventions used to represent the trill and the tap in two transcription traditions: the Americanist Transcription System and the International Phonetic Alphabet. From the 213 languages covered until 2021, we carefully analyze the 162 that have trills and/or taps, using the information provided in Illustrations. Our results show that r tends to be used to represent a generic ‘r-like’ sound in both transcription traditions. More precisely, by comparing the use of r in the consonant tables and in the transcriptions of their accompanying narrative texts, we show that r is not systematically associated with an alveolar trill. Furthermore, we show that phonetic trills are less frequent than phonetic taps, while phonemic trills are more frequent than phonemic taps. As a consequence, inferring the presence of trilling in a sound system from the presence of r in its transcription is not as straightforward as one might expect. These findings highlight the critical importance of being absolutely explicit about the meaning of the various symbols found in grammars and secondary databases, and of r in particular, as a preliminary step in a broad range of studies, including cross-linguistic comparisons, inferences about the past or generalizations about language acquisition and articulatory effort.

This study presents the results of an acoustic analysis of Oromo vowels of the northern dialect. The data for the study were collected from 19 speakers (nine female, 10 male) who produced the vowels in the same phonetic environment. Such acoustic measures as duration, fundamental frequency and the first three formant frequencies were extracted for the analysis. In a linear mixed-effects model, each acoustic parameter was modelled as a function of the fixed effects such as gender and vowel quality, and of participants’ random effects. The model shows a main effect of gender on all the acoustic measures, with the female speakers producing the vowels with significantly greater duration and formant frequencies. The model also indicates the main effect of vowel quality on all the acoustic measures with the exception of duration. The proportion of variances explained by gender and vowel quality is found to be large for fundamental frequency and the first formant frequency respectively. As regards the classification of the vowels, Support Vector Machine reveals that the time-varying frequency does not have an advantage over a steady state in separating vowels of both genders. However, it is generally fairly effective in classifying vowels of the dialect of the language.

This work asks how the syllable as a unit is delimited in space and time. To do this we bring together two theoretical approaches to the syllable: a sonority-based approach which emphasizes spatial organization, and the coupled oscillator model (Nam, Goldstein & Saltzman 2009) which emphasizes temporal organization. Many languages present challenges to these theories, and here we focus on Georgian, which is problematic for both approaches, as Georgian permits onset clusters of up to seven consonants and of any sonority shape. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between gestural overlap and sonority shape in Georgian via electromagnetic articulography. Drawing on data from three speakers, we examine gestural overlap in two-consonant onsets that vary in sonority shape and order of place of articulation. Using two measures of gestural overlap, we find (i) long lag between consonant gestures, which we suggest is language-specific and (ii) that lag is largest in sonority rises and smallest in sonority falls. These results suggest that neither phonemic recoverability nor a hierarchical effect of increasingly open constrictions is the primary motivator behind inter-consonantal timing. Instead, the high degree of overlap in sonority falls ensures their tautosyllabic parse, which would otherwise be threatened by intrusive vocoids. Thus, we argue that recoverability of the syllable as a unit is the major motivating factor behind the timing patterns observed, and that syllables emerge not solely from either spatial or temporal properties, but from the interplay of the two.

Qaqet (Glottocode qaqe1238; ISO 639-3: byx) is a Papuan (i.e. non-Austronesian) Baining language that is spoken by an estimated 15,000 people in Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province. Figure 1 shows a map of where Qaqet and the four other known Baining languages (Mali, Kairak (also spelt Qairaq – see map), Simbali and Ura) are spoken (see Stebbins, Evans & Terrill 2017 for an overview of Baining; for phonological descriptions, see Stanton 2007 on Ura, and Stebbins 2011 on Mali). The wider affiliations of the Baining languages are unknown. They share typological features with other East Papuan languages (i.e. the non-Austronesian languages of Island Melanesia), but there is no historical-comparative evidence to establish genealogical relationships.1 In terms of phonology, there are no structures shared across all of East Papuan, but Baining languages have similarities to the East Papuan language Kuot spoken on neighbouring New Ireland (i.e. the intervocalic lenition of voiceless plosives; pitch movements at the right edge of intonation units).2 Furthermore, language contact is known to have taken place across the entire region, and Baining languages share typological features with Oceanic languages. This includes phonemic contrasts between voiceless and voiced plosives and between /r/ and /l/; as well as a number of morphosyntactic structures (e.g. a large inventory of definite and indefinite articles, AVO/SV constituent order, prepositions).

This Illustration of the IPA describes the sound system of the local dialect of Basque (euskara, euskera, IS0-639-3 eus) spoken in the town of Markina-Xemein, in the province of Bizkaia (Biscay), within the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain (see maps in Figures 1 and 2. Speakers of this local variety of Basque refer to it as markiñarra or Markiñeko euskerie.

Albanian (endonym: Shqip; Glotto: alba1268) is an Indo-European language which has been suggested to form an independent branch of the Indo-European family since the middle of the nineteenth century (Bopp 1855, Pedersen 1897, Çabej 1976). Though the origin of the language has been debated, the prevailing opinion in the literature is that it is a descendant of Illyrian (Hetzer 1995). Albanian is currently spoken by around 6–7 million people (Rusakov 2017: 552; Curtis 2018: 1800), the majority of whom live in Albania and Kosovo, with others in Italy, Greece, North Macedonia and Montenegro. Figure 1 shows a map of the main Albanian-speaking areas of Europe, with major linguistic subdivisions according to Gjinari (1988) and Elsie & Gross (2009) marked by different colours and shades.

Hefei Mandarin is a Chinese dialect spoken in Hefei, the capital city of Anhui Province, China, as illustrated in Figure 1. According to The Language Atlas of China (1987), Hefei Mandarin is a sub-branch of Jianghuai Mandarin, i.e. the varieties of Mandarin dialects distributed between the Yangtze River and the Huai River. While its syllable structure is relatively simple, Hefei Mandarin has a rich vowel inventory and various types of rimes, including three contrastive high back vowels /ɯ o ɤ/, non-nasalized vs. nasalized vowels as syllable rimes such as /i/ vs. /ĩ/, and three syllabic consonants [ɹ̩ ɹ̩ʷ ɻ̩] (Li 1936; Meng 1962, 1997; Li 1994, 1997; Wang 1996; Kong 2003, 2004, 2006; Kong & Zhang 2006; Kong, Wu & Li 2019).

Brazilian Veneto is a Romance language spoken by approximately 500,000 people, most of whom live in the southern Brazilian states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná (Margotti 2004, Pereira 2017). It is also spoken in the southeastern Brazilian states of São Paulo and Espírito Santo (see e.g. Loriato 2019). The language is often referred to by its speakers as Talian (/taˈljaŋ/), meaning ‘Italian’, given the geographical origin of the speakers who developed it, even though it is not a variety of Standard Italian. In this Illustration, I will refer to the language under examination as Talian, following many speakers’ naming preference.

San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec (SSM) (ISO:mks), also known as Tò’on Ndà’vi, is a language of the Mixtecan family, Otomanguean stock (Rensch 1976). The Mixtecan language family consists of Mixtec, Cuicatec and Trique, though Mixtec and Cuicatec are part of the same subgroup, also called Mixtecan (Josserand 1983: 99–101). SSM is part of the Mixteca Baja region of Oaxaca (Josserand 1983: 107). San Sebastián del Monte is a town in the Santo Domingo Tonalá municipality of Oaxaca State, Mexico, in the district of Huajuapan de León, 45 km southwest of Huajuapan de León (see Figure 1), with a population of approximately 2000 people (latitude: 17.677778, longitude: −98.021944).