Mono is a Banda language spoken in the northwestern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is part of the larger Adamawa-Ubangi language family. The following description is based on the variety of the language spoken in Bili, Bosobolo Zone, DRC. Mono speakers consider this to be the most prestigious variety of the language. The sound inventory is relatively homogenous in Bili and the surrounding area. The orthography given here was approved by the Mono volunteer language development committee in 1994. Previous studies of Mono include Olson & Schrag (2000), Olson (2001) and Kamanda-Kola (2003).

Ibibio is a Lower Cross (Delta Cross, Cross River, New Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo) language spoken mainly in Akwa Ibom State and in parts of Cross River State, both located in the southeastern part of Nigeria. The number of speakers is estimated at about four million (Essien 1991). Previous work on Ibibio phonetics includes Connell (1992, 1994, 1995) and Urua (1996/97, 2000, 2002). The variety presented here is spoken in Uruan area and Uyo, the capital city of Akwa Ibom State and the recording is that of the author, a female university teacher from Uruan.

Italian is spoken in Italy, in parts of Switzerland and Croatia, and in diaspora communities across the world. The standard language as spoken in Italy has three main regional varieties: Northern, Central and Southern. But contemporary ‘mainstream Italian’ – not following the standard in all respects – appears to be a variety under construction by speakers wishing to give themselves a national appeal, a process driven by the media and by workplace mobility. Our speaker is representative of this group. She is a woman in her thirties who was brought up in a middle-class household in Rome, and has travelled extensively in Italy and abroad. She aims at a cultivated accent with no strong regional features, sometimes called a ‘RAI’ accent (RAI /rai/ is the national broadcaster). The style she uses is a somewhat coloured ‘storytelling’ style.

Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken by 53 million speakers in India, according to census figures from 1991, predominantly in the state of Tamil Nadu. There are also sizeable communities of Tamil speakers elsewhere, including Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore, in all of which it has the status of a national language. Tamil is diglossic, the formal or ‘literary’ variety still largely conforming to standards set in the thirteenth century by the Tamil grammarian Pavanandi. It is used in almost all written media, and also for certain high-register functions. In all other situations colloquial Tamil is used and is characterized by considerable regional and social variation.

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.

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).

Friulian is spoken by over 700,000 people in the far northeastern Italian region Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a noticeably conservative area which borders Austria in the north, Slovenia in the east, the Adriatic sea in the south and the Veneto region in the west. The Friulian varieties are sufficiently well-differentiated from adjacent dialects of the Romance group, especially from the Venetian ones. Some varieties of the Venetian type are also spoken within the boundaries of the administrative region Friuli Venezia-Giulia, in the east (including Trieste), in the west and in several areas in the extreme south. A Friulian-Venetian diglossia is widespread in the main towns of the region, being a result of both historical (prestige of Venetian institutions during the centuries of the Serenissima's supremacy) and social circumstances (recent immigration from the neighbouring Veneto). On the other hand, Friulian is also spoken outside Friuli, in the district of Portogruaro (today part of the Veneto region), along the Friulian border (coinciding with the Tagliamento river), as well as outside Italy (especially in Australia, the Americas and South Africa), as a result of emigration. Some groups of Friulian speakers are still found in Rumania (Iliescu 1972).

Nara is a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by some 41,000 people to the north-west of Barentu in northern Eritrea. It is now regarded as constituting a one-language branch of the East Sudanic family (Bender 1989: 20; though see Ehret 1989: 49) but formerly it had been treated as an isolate within the phylum. The fullest description of the language in existence is that of Reinisch (1874) though in that work, the language name is given as ‘Barea’, which is an unfortunate choice since it is the word for ‘slave’ in a number of Ethiopian Semitic languages; Nara is the term used by the speech community for referring to their language as well as to themselves. Four distinct dialects need to be recognized within Nara, namely: Higir, Mogorayeb, Koyta and Saantoorta.

Ega is an endangered language spoken in the south-central region of Côte d'Ivoire, in Divo Department. The precise number of speakers is not known at present; the 14th Ethnologue (Grimes 2000) reports 291 to 3,000, and notes that ‘the ethnic group is growing, but they are shifting to the Dida language because of intermarriage and other influences’. Our own preliminary and impressionistic work suggests the number of Ega speakers to be closer to the upper end of this range, perhaps around 2,000, but we note that Ega now serves a decreasing number of sociolinguistic functions, to the extent that in at least some villages Dida has replaced Ega as the primary language of daily use. It is also clear that the degree of intergenerational transmission is low in many, if not all, Ega villages.

Jicarilla Apache is an Eastern Apachean language, a member of the Athabaskan family of North American languages. The speech described here is that of one of the authors, Merton Sandoval of Dulce, New Mexico. The Apachean group is comprised of Western Apachean (Navajo; the Western Apache dialects Cibecue, San Carlos, and White Mountain; and Chiricahua and Mescalero) Eastern Apachean (Jicarilla, Lipan) and Plains Apache (formerly called Kiowa Apache). The other major groups of Athabaskan languages include the northern group of languages spoken in Alaska and Canada, and the Pacific Coast group spoken in Oregon and California. While the western Apachean languages have a well-documented member in Navajo, the eastern group is less well known, being best documented so far in the works of Goddard (1911), Hoijer (1938, 1945, 1946a, 1946b) and Jung (1999). Differences between the western and eastern groups concentrate in consonant development and the evolution of stem shape, and, to some extent, in the lexicon; however, Jicarilla resembles all other Athabaskan languages in bearing a close morphological relationship to all its relatives.

Kéo is an Austronesian language spoken by approximately 40,000 speakers in central Flores in eastern Indonesia. Hitherto, Kéo has been linguistically undescribed. The data for this article comes from linguistic fieldwork undertaken by the author with native Kéo speakers on the islands of Flores and Bali in Indonesia, and in Canberra, Australia. Other, written sources include (Baird 2001) and (Baird 2002). Kéo has been said to belong to the Ende-Lio languages of the Bima-Sumba subgroup of the Central Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family (B. Grimes 1988, C. Grimes et al. 1997). The Central/Eastern Malayo-Polynesian grouping has been proposed by Blust, but this is not strongly supported by the comparative method. Likewise, there is very little evidence to support the notion of a Bima-Sumba subgroup at this stage. Much more linguistic work needs to be undertaken in the region before precise genetic relationships can be established.

Burmese is the official language of Burma. (In English, ‘Burmese’ and ‘Burma’ are also known as ‘Myanmar’, and ‘Rangoon’ as ‘Yangon’.) It is the major language of the Burmic branch of Tibeto-Burman, and is spoken natively by upwards of 30 million people in the lower valleys of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin rivers, the central plain of Burma and the Irrawaddy Delta, and non-natively by up to another 10 million speakers of other languages in Burma.

Chickasaw is a Muskogean language spoken in south-central Oklahoma. Published descriptions of Chickasaw phonetics include Munro & Willmond (1994), Munro (to appear), and Gordon et al. (2000). The following description is a summary of the principal phonetic aspects of Chickasaw drawn primarily from these works.

Nuuchahnulth (PHONETICS), often referred to in the literature as Nootka, is a Wakashan language spoken by people living on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. Each of thirteen Nuuchahnulth bands represents a different dialect group. Nitinaht (Diitiidath) is usually included in the Nuuchahnulth group, but it is divergent enough to be considered a separate language. The data in this illustration represent the Ahousaht (PHONETICS) dialect.

The Shipibo language is spoken by about 30,000 people in the Ucayali River valley, in the Upper Amazon watershed in the central eastern part of Peru. The language is sometimes also called Shipibo-Conibo after the two main previously distinct ethnic groups which form its speakers. It is a member of the Panoan family and thus is related to such languages as Capanahua, Amahuaca and Chacobo. Panoan languages are principally found in Peru but the family also has members in Bolivia and Brazil. This description is based on the speech of the second author, a 30-year-old male from the village of Dos Unidos de Pachitea. The Río Pachitea flows into the Ucayali, which itself forms one of the major headwaters of the Amazon.