This paper outlines a theoretical approach to speech sound systems based on the notion of phonological potentials: physical ‘pressures’ or biases that give rise to discrete structure and the tendencies associated with this structure that arise from the physical nature of speech sound systems. We apply this approach to a poorly understood area of phonology – phenomena of the lower vocal tract (LVT) – through a schematic that encapsulates the complex interactions among the vocal tract structures responsible for producing LVT sounds. With the framework, we provide an account of a range of LVT phenomena from several languages, illustrating how tonal, phonatory, and vowel qualities interact. Finally, we consider how the idea of phonological potentials extends across various physical domains and might exhibit patterns of alignment across these domains, thereby serving to guide the formation of patterns found in speech sound systems.

Buenos Aires Spanish (BAS) is well known for the sound change that led the palatal obstruent to become a post-alveolar fricative. However, that obstruent is not the only palatal phoneme undergoing sound change in BAS. The present study investigates the production of /ɲ/ and /nj/ in BAS, which have been reported as merging (Malmberg 1950). Previous research suggests that some speakers produce a ‘traditional’ (alveolo)palatal nasal, while other speakers realize /ɲ/ with two distinct non-simultaneous constrictions: alveolar/postalveolar and palatal (Kochetov & Colantoni 2011). An acoustic analysis is based on the speech of 33 speakers (15 males, 17 females; from four age groups: 15–19 years old, 20–29 years, 30–45 years and 45+ years) and was obtained by measuring duration and formant contours in the tautosyllabic vocalic portion. Results reveal that /ɲ/ and /nj/ are not fully merged, as some speakers produce differences. Specifically, the results indicate that production differences between men and women disappear as age decreases, with female speakers being more innovative. Findings provide evidence that the sound change is still progressing and probably nearing completion, and show that the palatal system in BAS is losing the (alveolo)palatal nasal.

The majority of studies on phonation types have focused on low vowels due to the minimal effects of their first formant on harmonic amplitude. In studies of multiple vowel qualities, reports on the relationship between vowel and voice quality are mixed: some show similar formant frequencies across phonation types (e.g. Abramson, Nye & Luangthongkum 2007, Khan 2012), while others show different formant frequencies depending on voice quality (e.g. Ren 1992, Kuang 2011). Results differ as to whether the degree of non-modal phonation varies (Andruski & Ratliff 2000, Kuang 2011) or does not vary (Esposito 2012, Khan 2012) across different vowel qualities. The present study draws on innovations which allow for more accurate corrections for the effects of formant frequencies on spectral measures (i.e. Hanson 1995, Iseli, Shue & Alwan 2007) to examine the relationship between vowel quality and voice quality, in eight languages – !Xóõ, Burmese, Gujarati, Jalapa de Díaz Mazatec, Mon, Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec, White Hmong, and Yi. While no significant difference in the degree of non-modal phonation due to vowel quality was found, results showed a crosslinguistic pattern in the relationship between vowel quality and voice quality: vowels with higher log(F1) and log(F2) values tended to be produced with creakier phonation, while vowels with lower log(F1) and log(F2) values tended to be produced with breathier phonation, but only on the measure H1*-H2*.

This study investigates the acoustic and articulatory properties of phonation contrast in Shanghainese, the most thoroughly studied Chinese Wu dialect. Although previous studies generally suggest that the non-modal phonation associated with the lower register in Shanghainese is relatively breathier, it is unclear whether it is ‘breathy voice’, ‘slack voice’ or ‘whispery voice’. This study aims to provide a better understanding of the phonetic realization of the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese. Simultaneous audio and electroglottographic recordings were made from 52 speakers born before 1980. Both acoustic and articulatory data confirmed that the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese is produced with relatively less glottal constriction and more aperiodic noise than the modal phonation. The novel finding of this study is that aperiodic noise plays a much more important role than spectral measures (i.e. indicators of glottal constriction) in the phonetic realization of the non-modal phonation. This property is distinct from the breathier voices in Gujarati, White Hmong and Southern Yi. These results suggest that the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese should be characterized as ‘whispery voice’, which is phonetically distinct from both ‘breathy voice’ and ‘slack voice’.

This paper presents an acoustic study of the vowel system of Southern Ute, a Southern Numic Uto-Aztecan language spoken in southwestern Colorado. Previous auditory accounts proposed an inventory of five vowel phonemes that participate in three allophonic processes and contrast in length and stress. We investigate how the vowels are realized at the phonetic level by analyzing F1, F2, duration, spectral emphasis and f0 in over 6000 vowel tokens produced by eight fluent speakers (four female and four male). Our findings provide new phonetic detail for the earlier non-instrumental descriptions of the language, including both expected and previously unreported effects. We confirm the existence of five distinct phonemic categories but show that their prototypical phonetic realizations and positional allophones do not always match the earlier descriptions. We also describe how phonemic length and stress are marked in Southern Ute.

In the current study, we explore the factors underlying the well-known difficulty in acoustic classification of front nonsibilant fricatives (Maniwa, Jongman & Wade 2009, McMurray & Jongman 2011) by applying a novel classification method to the production of Greek speakers. The Greek fricative inventory [f v θ ð s z ç ʝ x ɣ] includes voiced and voiceless segments from five distinct places of articulation. Our corpus contains all of the Greek fricatives produced by 29 monolingual speakers, but our focus is on the distinction between the front nonsibilant fricatives [f v θ ð]. For comparison, we also discuss the other places of articulation where relevant. We apply a relatively novel classification method based on cepstral coefficients, previously successful in categorizing English obstruent bursts (Bunnell, Polikoff & McNicholas 2004), English vowels (Ferragne & Pellegrino 2010), Romanian fricatives (Spinu & Lilley 2016), and Russian fricatives (Spinu, Kochetov & Lilley 2018). For this study, fricative boundaries were automatically aligned using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and then manually checked. Six Bark-frequency cepstral coefficients (c0–c5) were extracted from 20-millisecond Hann windows. HMMs were used to divide the fricatives and adjacent vowels into three regions of internally minimized variance. A multinomial logistic regression analysis then used the mean cepstral coefficients from each region as predictors for classification by consonant identity. Our method yields highly successful classification rates, exceeding the performance of previous methods. We discuss these results in light of the differences of the phonemic distributions of fricatives between English and Greek.

Upper Necaxa Totonac is a Totonacan language spoken in the Necaxa River valley in the Sierra Norte of Puebla State, Mexico. While the Totonacan languages historically have three phonemic vowel qualities, the Upper Necaxa system consists of five vowels that contrast length and laryngealization. With acoustic data from six native speakers from the Totonacan communities of Patla and Chicontla, we explore the phonetic properties of vowels with respect to the first and second formant frequencies, quantity (duration), vowel phonation (modal vs. laryngeal), and stress. The data indicate that long, short, modal and laryngeal vowels occupy a similar formant space and that duration is the primary phonetic correlate of phonemic vowel length. A shift in vowel quality and an increase in duration and pitch were shown to be the acoustic characteristics of stress. The study provides a first acoustic analysis of vowels in Upper Necaxa, and contributes to typological descriptions of the properties of vowels connected with quality, quantity, stress, and phonation.

Glottalisation functions as a cue to coda stop voicelessness in many varieties of English, occurring most commonly for alveolar stops, although varieties differ according to the context and frequency with which glottalisation is used. In Australian English, younger speakers glottalise voiceless coda stops at much higher rates than older speakers suggesting a recent change to the variety, yet this change has only been examined in stressed syllables for stops with alveolar place of articulation. In addition, research has found that glottalisation occurs in a trading relationship with preceding vowel duration to cue coda stop voicing: younger speakers make less use of vowel duration and more use of glottalisation. This study investigates glottalisation as a cue to coda voicing in unstressed syllables, an environment in which coda voicing-related vowel durational differences are already reduced. We examine this phenomenon in two separate datasets of Australian English with reference to stops at three places of articulation to explore dialect-specific distributional patterns and to track the potential progression of change. The results suggest that glottalisation occurs in conjunction with voiceless stops at all places of articulation in the unstressed Australian English contexts examined here. The results also confirm that younger speakers employ glottalisation more than older speakers, and show that females glottalise more than males, both results supporting previous suggestions of a recent change to the variety.

Presently there is no consensus regarding the interpretation and analysis of the stress system of Moroccan Arabic. This paper tests whether the acoustic realisation of syllables support one widely adopted interpretation of lexical stress, according to which stress is either penultimate or final depending on syllable weight. The experiment reports on word-initial syllables that differ in presumed stress status. Target words were embedded in a carrier sentence within a scripted mock dialogue to ensure that the measurements reflect lexical stress rather than phrase-level prominence. Results from all four acoustic parameters tested (f0, duration, Centre of Gravity and vowel quality) showed that there were no differences as a function of presumed stress status, thus failing to support an interpretation according to which stressed syllables are acoustically differentiated. We consider the results in relation to previous claims and observations, and conclude that the absence of acoustic correlates of presumed stress is compatible with the view that Moroccan Arabic lacks lexical stress.

The IPA currently does not specify how to represent prenasalization, preglottalization or preaspiration. We first review some current transcription practices, and phonetic and phonological literature bearing on the unitary status of prenasalized, preglottalized and preaspirated segments. We then propose that the IPA adopt superscript diacritics placed before a base symbol for these three phenomena. We also suggest how the current IPA Diacritics chart can be modified to allow these diacritics to be fit within the chart.

Belarusian (ISO 639-3 BEL) is an Eastern Slavic language spoken by roughly seven million people in the Republic of Belarus (Zaprudski 2007, Census of the Republic of Belarus 2009), a land-locked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest (Figure 1). Within the Belarusian language, the two main dialects are North Eastern and South Western (Avanesaǔ et al. 1963, Lapkoǔskaya 2008, Smolskaya 2011). Two additional regional forms of Belarusian can be distinguished: the Middle Belarusian dialectal group, incorporating some features of North Eastern and South Western dialects together with certain characteristics of its own, and the West-Polesian (or Brest-Pinsk) dialectal group. The latter group is more distinct linguistically from the other Belarusian dialects and is in many respects close to the Ukrainian language (Lapkoǔskaya 2008, Smolskaya 2011). The focus of this illustration is Standard Belarusian, which is based on Middle Belarusian speech varieties. For details on the phonetic differences across dialects, the reader is referred to Avanesaǔ et al. (1963) and Lapkoǔskaya (2008).

Scottish Gaelic is a minority language of Scotland spoken by approximately 58,000 people, or 1% of the Scottish population (speaker numbers from the 2011 Census available in National Records of Scotland 2015). Here, we refer to the language as ‘Gaelic’, pronounced in British English as /ɡalɪk/, as is customary within the Gaelic-speaking community. In Gaelic, the language is referred to as Gàidhlig /kaːlɪc/. Gaelic is a Celtic language, closely related to Irish (MacAulay 1992, Ní Chasaide 1999, Gillies 2009). Although Gaelic was widely spoken across much of Scotland in medieval times (Withers 1984, Clancy 2009), the language has recently declined in traditional areas such as the western seaboard and western islands of Scotland and is now considered ‘definitely endangered’ by UNESCO classification (Moseley 2010). Analysis of the location of Gaelic speakers in Scotland and maps from the most recent Census in 2011 can be found in National Records of Scotland (2015). Figure 1 shows the location of Gaelic speakers in Scotland as a percentage of the inhabitants aged over three in each Civil Parish who reported being able to speak Gaelic in the 2011 Census.

Kalasha (ISO 639-3: kls), also known as Kalashamon, is a Northwestern Indo-Aryan language spoken in Chitral District of Khyber Pakhtunkwa Province in northern Pakistan, primarily in the valleys of Bumburet, Rumbur, Urtsun, and Birir, as shown in Figure 1. The number of speakers is estimated between 3000 and 5000. The Ethnologue classifies the language status as ‘vigorous’ (Eberhard, Simons & Fennig 2019) but some researchers consider it ‘threatened’ (Rahman 2006, Khan & Mela-Athanasopoulou 2011). Kalasha has been in close contact with Nuristani and other Northwestern Indo-Aryan languages. Among the latter, the influence of Khowar has been particularly strong because it functions as a lingua franca of Chitral District (Liljegren & Khan 2017). The Kalasha lexicon includes many loanwords from Khowar, as well as from Persian, Arabic, and Urdu (Trail & Cooper 1999). Early efforts to put the language in writing employed Arabic script but a Latin-based script was adopted in 2000 (Cooper 2005, Kalash & Heegård 2016).

Kazakh (ISO 639-3, kaz) is a Kipchak (Northwestern) Turkic language with approximately ten million speakers (Muhamedowa 2015). While the majority of Kazakh speakers live in the Republic of Kazakhstan, significant Kazakh-speaking populations exist throughout Central Asia. See Figure 1 for a map of the region. Kazakh spoken in Kazakhstan is described as having three or four dialects, but many researchers agree that differences between dialects are small and largely lexical (Kara 2002, Grenoble 2003, Muhamedowa 2015; see Amanzholov 1959 for more on Kazakh dialects).

Khuzestani Arabic (ISO 639-3) is a minority language spoken in the southern west of Iran, in Khuzestan province (see Figure 1). The majority of its speakers live in Ahwaz, Howeyzeh, Bostan, Susangerd, Shush, Abadan, Khorramshahr, Shadegan, Hamidiyeh (Balawi & Khezri 2014: 107), Karun, and Bawi. According to Blanc (1964: 6), this variety of Arabic is closely related to the Gelet subgroup of Mesopotamian dialects.1 This dialect is in contact with Bakhtiyari Lori and Persian (Iranian languages of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European language family), as well as Iraqi Arabic. The lexis of the dialect predominantly contains Arabic words, but it also has several Persian, English, French, and Turkish loanwords.

Malacca Portuguese Creole (MPC) (ISO 639-3; code: mcm), popularly known as Malacca Portuguese or locally as (Papiá) Cristang, belongs to the group of Portuguese-lexified creoles of (South)east Asia, which includes the extinct varieties of Batavia/Tugu (Maurer 2013) and Bidau, East Timor (Baxter 1990), and the moribund variety of Macau (Baxter 2009). MPC has its origins in the Portuguese presence in Malacca, and like the other creoles in this subset, it is genetically related to the Portuguese Creoles of South Asia (Holm 1988, Cardoso, Baxter & Nunes 2012).

The Bai language () is spoken by approximately 1.6 million people in northwest Yunnan Province, China. Of the 25 minority languages spoken in Yunnan, where 33% of the population are ethnic minorities and 67% are Han Chinese, the Bai ethnic minority is second in population only to the Yi (Wiersma 1990, 2003; 2010 census). Bai is classified as a Tibeto-Burman language (Xu & Zhao 1964, 1984), although arguments have been raised as to its possible early Sinitic origins (Starostin 1994, 1995). A summary in French reviews Chinese loanwords, ancient Bai, and comparative Bai dialects (Dell 1981). The historical influence of Chinese on Bai has been significant, but evidence is not compelling that Bai is Sinitic (Norman 2003: 73). There are three major dialects of Bái: Jiànchuān (), Dàlĭ (), and Bìjiāng (). The data in this illustration represent the variety of Jianchuan (jian1239, BCA). The third author (), who was about 60 years old at the time of recording, is a male native of the Jianchuan region, originating from QiÁohǒu, a mountain village some 50 km southwest of Jianchuan city – a remote area known for salt mining and where the language has been less influenced by modern Chinese. These locations are indicated on the map of Yunnan (the southwesternmost province of China in an intensely minority-language-populated area) in Figure 1. The traditional geographical link from Qiaohou is to Jianchuan to the north rather than to Dali to the south, and many of the most distinctive characteristics of Jianchuan Bai described here are not found in Dali Bai.

Bajau is spoken as the primary language from the Philippines to Borneo to eastern Indonesia, by both nomadic and settled communities. It is also known as Badjaw, Badjo, Bajao, Bajo, Bayo, Gaj, Indonesian Bajaw, Orang Laut, Sama, and Terijene; see Simons & Fennig 2017. Glottolog.org lists ‘Indonesian Bajau’ as a language spoken on the south-eastern coast of Sulawesi, glottocode indo1317 and ISO 639-3 bdl. Clifton (2010) claims the population of Bajau speakers is 700,000–900,000, with around 150,000–230,000 in eastern Indonesia (Sather 1997) and 92,000 in Sulawesi (Mead & Lee 2007). There are also Bajau-speaking populations in the Philippines and Borneo (Jun 2005); see Figure 1. Bajau is classified as a threatened Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian language (Simons & Fennig 2017). It has been proposed that the language originated in the Zamboanga-Basilan area in southern Philippines (Jun 2005 citing Pallesen 1985).