This study explores the phenomenon of uvularization in the vowel systems of two Heishui County varieties of Qiang, a Sino-Tibetan language of Sichuan Province, China. Ultrasound imaging (one speaker) shows that uvularized vowels have two tongue gestures: a rearward gesture, followed by movement toward the place of articulation of the corresponding plain vowel. Time-aligned acoustic and articulatory data show how movement toward the uvula correlates with changes in the acoustic signal. Acoustic correlates of uvularization (taken from two speakers) are seen most consistently in raising of vowel F1, lowering of F2 and in raising of the difference F3-F2. Imaging data and the formant structure of [l] show that uvular approximation can begin during the initial consonant that precedes a uvularized vowel. Uvularization is reflected phonologically in the phonotactic properties of vowels, while vowel harmony aids in the identification of plain–uvularized vowel pairs. The data reported in this paper argue in favor of a revision of the catalog of secondary articulations recognized by the International Phonetic Alphabet, in order to include uvularization, which can be marked with the symbol [ʶ] in the case of approximation and [χ] for secondary uvular frication.

In Central Catalan, phonological vowel reduction causes the stressed seven-vowel system to reduce in number in unstressed position, where only the three reduced vowels [i ə u] can occur. Exceptionally, full vowels (typically expected in a stressed syllable only) can appear in unstressed syllables in certain contexts. This study explores the acoustic characteristics of phonologically unreduced vowels found exceptionally in unstressed position in Central Catalan and compares them to stressed full vowels and corresponding unstressed (phonologically reduced) vowels. Results show that, contrary to traditional descriptions, presumably phonologically unreduced vowels in verb + noun compounds sporadically undergo phonological vowel reduction. When they do not, they are shorter than stressed vowels and more centralized in the F1*F2 vowel space. In addition, stressed full vowels do not differ in accented vs. unaccented contexts in duration or vowel quality, indicating that vowels are hyperarticulated under lexical stress, but not when they receive intonational pitch accent. The findings contribute to a body of cross-linguistic research dealing with the influence of prosody at the segmental level.

The present study examined lexical stress patterns in Uyghur, a Turkic language. The main goal of this research was to isolate and determine which acoustic parameters provide cues to stress in Uyghur. A number of studies have investigated the phonetic correlates of lexical stress across the world's languages, with stressed syllables often longer in duration, higher in pitch, and greater in amplitude. The present study systematically investigated the acoustic cues to stress in Uyghur, examining duration, fundamental frequency, and amplitude. Three experiments were conducted: one utilizing minimal pairs in Uyghur, one examining disyllabic nouns in Uyghur that contrasted in the first syllable, and one investigating the interaction of lexical stress with Uyghur sentence intonation. The data consistently show that duration was a robust cue to stress in Uyghur, with less consistent effects for intensity. The data also clearly show that fundamental frequency was not a cue to lexical stress in Uyghur. Uyghur does not use the fundamental frequency to distinguish stressed from unstressed syllables. The results suggest that Uyghur does not pattern like a pitch-accent language (e.g. Turkish), but rather like a stress-accent language.

This paper provides an acoustic phonetic description of Hawai‘i English vowels. The data comprise wordlist tokens produced by twenty-three speakers (twelve males and eleven females) and spontaneous speech tokens produced by ten of those speakers. Analysis of these vowel tokens shows that while there are similarities between Hawai‘i English and other dialects, the particular combination of vowel realizations in Hawai‘i English is unique to this dialect. Additionally, there are characteristics of the Hawai‘i English vowel system that are not found in other English dialects. These findings suggest that Hawai‘i English is a unique regional variety that warrants further description.

Makasar is an Austronesian language belonging to the South Sulawesi subgroup within the large Western-Malayo Polynesian family. It is spoken by about two million people in the province of South Sulawesi in Indonesia, and is the second largest language on the island of Sulawesi (behind Bugis, with about three million speakers). The phonology is notable for the large number of geminate and pre-glottalised consonant sequences, while the morphology is characterised by highly productive affixation and pervasive encliticisation of pronominal and aspectual elements. The language has a literary tradition including detailed local histories (Cummings 2002), and over the centuries has been represented orthographically in many ways: with two indigenous Indic or aksara-based scripts, a system based on Arabic script, and a variety of Romanised conventions. From at least the early 18th century Macassan sailors travelled regularly to northern Australia to collect and process trepang or sea cucumber (Macknight 1976), and many loanwords passed into Aboriginal languages of the northern part of Australia (Evans 1992, 1997).

Amarasi (ISO 693–3 aaz), spoken in the south-western part of the island of Timor, is at one end of the complex Uab Meto language chain. Uab Meto (also called Dawan[ese], Timorese or Atoni) is a cluster of closely related Austronesian languages and dialects spoken in Timor.