After my retirement in 2006 I started to write a phonetic blog discussing everything to do with phonetics, seen from my personal and professional perspective. I did this partly to keep my mind active after retirement; in a sense the interaction with a web-based readership served to replace the daily dialogue with colleagues and students that I enjoyed while employed as professor at UCL. Now I’m delighted to be able to share this compilation from it with a wider audience.

I’ve assumed that the reader is familiar with basic phonetic notions and with the International Phonetic Alphabet: see the IPA Handbook (Cambridge University Press 1999) and the IPA chart (www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html). If you want to brush up on this, there are plenty of textbooks available. Try Practical Phonetics and Phonology by Beverley Collins and Inger M. Mees (Routledge 2013, third edition). Wikipedia is also a useful and generally reliable resource. You may wish to refer to my own works: Accents of English (Cambridge University Press 1982, three volumes), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (Pearson Education 2008, third edition – referenced below as LPD) and English Intonation: an Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2006).