In a preface, one can perhaps be allowed to make some personal remarks. In my own training in the Department of Phonetics of the University of Edinburgh, I had the great privilege of being taught by some of the leading phoneticians of the century. Foremost amongst these were David Abercrombie and Peter Ladefoged. Ian Catford was also in Edinburgh at that time, at the School of Applied Linguistics. The hallmarks of their teaching were a scrupulous attention to objective phonetic detail, the development of excellent practical skills of phonetic performance and perception, and a rigorous concern for the architecture of phonetic theory. The abiding motivation of their work was always the linguistic relevance of speech.

These attitudes were and are strongly held, but they are not novel. They have been a characteristic of professional phoneticians in what one might call the British school since the days of Henry Sweet in the nineteenth century (Henderson 1971). One may not completely agree with the full implications of Sweet's claim when he wrote in his Preface to A Handbook of Phonetics (1877), that ‘The importance of phonetics as the indispensable foundation of all study of language – whether that study be purely theoretical, or practical as well – is now generally admitted.’ There are some aspects of linguistics (defined as the study of language) where the connection with speech as such is very tenuous; phonetics is undoubtedly indispensable, however, to the study of any aspect of spoken language.