Of the official languages of South Africa, Afrikaans has the widest geographical, demographic and racial distribution (Webb 2003). According to the latest South African census of 2011 (StatsSA 2012), Afrikaans as first language is spoken by 13.5% of the country's inhabitants, only surpassed in numbers by Zulu (22.7%) and Xhosa (16%). In neighbouring Namibia, 10.4% of the population has Afrikaans as their first language. A noteworthy number of recent emigrants to United Kingdom, Australia, Europe and North America are likely to be Afrikaans speakers as well.1 A handful of elderly persons in Patagonia still speak Afrikaans; they are descendants of some 600 Afrikaans speakers who settled in Patagonia at the beginning of the 20th century (Du Toit 1995, Coetzee et al. 2018).

A’ingae (also known as Cofán or Kofán) is a language isolate spoken by approximately 1,500 people in 13 communities in Ecuador and Colombia (Figure 1). Traditionally, the A’i (speakers of A’ingae) lived in the Andean foothills, but over the past century they have migrated down the Aguarico and San Miguel rivers, founding communities at Dureno and Zábalo, where the language is most widely spoken. This migration was spurred in large part by extensive oil contamination; an issue of great concern to the Foundation for the Survival of the Cofán People (FSC) and the community at large (Cepek 2012: 103; 2018: 1–15). Another concern in the Cofán community is the decreasing use of A’ingae, which, according to Ethnologue (Simons & Fennig 2017), is ‘endangered’ in Ecuador and ‘severely endangered’ in Colombia as a growing emphasis on Spanish disincentivizes the younger generation from learning A’ingae.

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.

Ambel (ISO 639-3: wgo) is an Austronesian language spoken by approximately 1600 people on the island of Waigeo in the Raja Ampat archipelago (West Papua province, Indonesia). Within Austronesian, Ambel belongs to the South Halmahera-West New Guinea (SHWNG) subbranch (see Blust 1978); within SHWNG, Ambel is classified as a Raja Ampat–South Halmahera language (RASH; Remijsen 2001:32–37; Kamholz 2014). Other languages spoken in Raja Ampat include Maˈya, Matbat, Biga, Batta, and several closely-related varieties on Salawati island (all RASH); Biak (a non-RASH SHWNG language); and varieties of Malay, in particular Papuan Malay. While historically Maˈya and Biak were used as lingua francas throughout the archipelago, these days Malay is the dominant language. The spread of Malay in recent decades has been facilitated by improvements in telecommunications and infrastructure in the region; the government-backed immigration of Indonesians from the overcrowded western islands of the nation to the more sparsely populated Papua; and a rapidly growing tourist industry throughout Raja Ampat.

As Ladefoged (1999) points out in his description of American English, there is considerable diversity in the phonetic characteristics of English spoken in North America, such that the commonly used phrase ‘General American English’ is not entirely meaningful. The description of American English provided by Ladefoged was based on a southern California dialect. The purpose of this report is to augment that account with a brief description of southern Michigan speech patterns. According to Labov and colleagues (e.g. Labov, Yeager & Steiner 1972, Labov 1994), southern Michigan, particularly in its urban areas, is part of a relatively large dialect region in the inland northeast United States called ‘Northern Cities’. According to Labov, the Northern Cities dialect cuts an irregular swath through a chain of cities in the inland northeast extending, roughly, from upstate New York (e.g. Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo), through northern Ohio (e.g. Cleveland, Toledo), southern Michigan (e.g. Detroit, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids), northwest Indiana (e.g. Gary, Hammond), northeast Illinois (e.g. Chicago, Rockford) and south-central Wisconsin (e.g. Milwaukee, Madison). Speakers from neighboring regions such as northwest Vermont, northwest Pennsylvania, and north-central/northeast Indiana appear to show some features of the dialect. Labov contends that the vowel shifts that characterize the Northern Cities dialect are observed in their most advanced forms in the largest urban areas of the region, such as Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester.

Gaza City, with a population of over half a million residents, is the largest urban center and de-facto capital of the Gaza Strip, which itself has a total population of over 1.8 million. As of 2018, it is estimated that at least 1.3 million of the residents of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees from other areas in historic Palestine, having fled to Gaza after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. These refugee communities originally come from the many historic rural areas that surrounded the Gaza Strip, smaller towns and cities along the Mediterranean coast, as well as areas further afield such as Jaffa, 69 km north of Gaza on the coast, and Bir il-Sab‘, the largest city in the Nagab desert region (see Figure 1). Linguistically, many of these refugee communities are of Palestinian Arabic dialect backgrounds, although varieties of Arabic spoken in the Nagab are classified as originating in the Hijaz area of what is today Saudi Arabia (see Shahin 2007 on Palestinian Arabic and Henkin 2010 on Nagab Arabic).

Although Spanish is a relatively unified language, in the sense that people from very distant locations manage to understand each other well, there are several phonetic phenomena that distinguish geographically separated varieties. The total number of native speakers of Spanish is above 400 million, and roughly 10% of them live in Argentina (Instituto Cervantes 2014). The accent described below corresponds to formal Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, and the main allophones are indicated by parentheses in the Consonant Table. The recordings are from a 49-year-old college-educated male speaker, who has lived all his life in either the city of Buenos Aires or the province of Buenos Aires.

The variety described here is representative of colloquial Assamese spoken in the eastern districts of Assam. Assam is a North-Eastern state of India, therefore Assamese and creoles of Assamese like Nagamese are spoken in the different North-Eastern states of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and also the neighbouring country of Bhutan. Approximately 15 million people speak Assamese in India (see Ethnologue, Gordon 2005, which lists 15,374,000 speakers including those in Bhutan and Bangladesh). In the pre-British era (until 1826), the kingdom of Assam was ruled by Ahom kings and the then capital was based in the Eastern district of Sibsagar and later in Jorhat. American missionaries established the first printing press in Sibsagar and in the year 1846 published a monthly periodical Arunodoi using the variety spoken in and around Sibsagar as the point of departure. This is the immediate reason which led to the acceptance of the formal variety spoken in eastern Assam (which roughly comprises of all the districts of Upper Assam). Having said that, the language spoken in these regions of Assam also show a certain degree of variation from the written form of the ‘standard’ language. As against the relative homogeneity of the variety spoken in eastern Assam, variation is considerable in certain other districts which would constitute the western part of Assam, comprising of the district of Kamrup up to Goalpara and Dhubri (see also Kakati 1962 and Grierson 1968). In contemporary Assam, for the purposes of mass media and communication, a certain neutral blend of eastern Assamese, without too many distinctive eastern features, like /ɹ/ deletion, which is a robust phenomenon in the eastern varieties, is still considered to be the norm. The lexis of Assamese is mainly Indo-Aryan, but it also has a sizeable amount of lexical items related to Bodo among other Tibeto-Burman languages (Kakati 1962), and there are a substantial number of items borrowed from Hindi, English and Bengali in recent times.

Asturian (ISO 639), also known as Bable, Asturiano, Asturianu, Astur-Leonese or Leonese, is the vernacular language of Principality of Asturias, an autonomous community of just over one million inhabitants located in Northern Spain. Asturian is spoken by approximately 100,000 individuals within Asturias plus a few thousand more outside of this region. Historically, Astur-Leonese was spoken in parts of the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora and there are still remnants of it in Castilian Spanish. In addition, a variety of Asturian – called Mirandés – is currently spoken in the Portuguese province of Miranda de Douro, where it is a language co-official with Portuguese (Figure 1).

Australian English is a regional dialect of English which shares its phonemic inventory with Southern British English through the historical connection with the dialects of the British Isles (in particular London) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Cochrane 1989, Yallop 2003, Leitner 2004). Speakers of present-day Australian English are typically those who are born in Australia or who immigrate at an early age when peer influence is maximal. Such speakers fall into three major dialect subgroups: Standard Australian English, Aboriginal English and Ethnocultural Australian English varieties. Standard Australian English (SAusE) is the dominant dialect and is used by the vast majority of speakers. It is a salient marker of national identity, and is used in broadcasting and in public life. The Aboriginal and Ethnocultural varieties are minority dialects allowing speakers to express their cultural identity within the multicultural Australian context (Cox & Palethorpe 2006, Clyne, Eisikovits & Tollfree 2001).

The Azerbaijani, Azerbaijanian or Azeri language belongs to the western group of the southwestern, or Oghuz, branch of the Turkic language family and is mainly spoken in Azerbaijan and Iran. Azerbaijani is the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan and over 80% of its population use it as their first language (Johanson 2010). Among non-Persian languages in Iran, Azerbaijani, with approximately 15–20 million native speakers, has the largest number of speakers (Crystal 2010). In total, more than 50 million people speak Azerbaijani (Khalilzadeh 2013).

The Baima language (/pêkê/, Chinese 白马语 báimăyŭ, ISO-639 code bqh) is a little-studied Tibeto-Burman (Bodic or Himalayish) language spoken in the southwestern part of the People’s Republic of China. Approximately 10,000 people, who traditionally reside in three counties in Sichuan Province (Pingwu 平武, Songpan 松潘 (in Written Tibetan, hereafter WT, zung chu), and Jiuzhaigou 九寨沟 (WT gzi rtsa sde dgu), and in one county in Gansu Province (Wenxian 文县), speak the Baima language (see Sichuan Sheng Minzu Yanjiusuo 1980, Zeng & Xiao 1987), see Figure 1.1 The largest concentrations of Baima speakers are in Baima Township (白马乡, Baima /tôpû/) of Pingwu County, and in Tielou Township (铁楼乡) of Wenxian County.

Bardi is the northernmost language of the Nyulnyulan family, a non-Pama-Nyungan family of the Western Kimberley region of northwestern Australia. Currently about five people speak the language fluently, but approximately 1,000 people identify as Bardi. The region was settled by Europeans in the 1880s and two missions were founded in Bardi country in the 1890s. Use of the language began declining in the 1930s. Many Bardi people were moved several times between 1940 and 1970, both to other missions dominated by speakers of other Indigenous languages and to local towns such as Derby. This community disruption accelerated the decline of language use in the community and first language acquisition. Bardi is the name of the language variety spoken at One Arm Point. There are two other named mutually intelligible varieties apart from Bardi: Baard and Jawi. The extent of dialect diversity within Bardi is unknown, but does not seem to have been particularly high compared to that between named varieties. The ISO-639 language code is [bcj].

Basaá [ɓàs ː] is spoken by 282,000 people in the forest area located in the South, Centre and Littoral regions of Cameroon (based on 1982 Ethnologue record; Lewis 2009). Basaá is a narrow Bantu language in the Niger-Congo language family, and it is classified as A43 (Guthrie 1967–71, A43a in Maho 2009). The ISO code of Basaá is bas (Lewis 2009).

The region of Béarn denotes the historically Romance-speaking part of the modern-day Pyrénées-Atlantiques département in south-western France. The langue d’oc or southern Gallo-Romance variety historically spoken in Béarn, commonly referred to as ‘Béarnais’, is a dialect of Gascon. This variety may also be referred to by its autoglossonym ‘Biarnés’ though the French term is the most widely used designation for the regional language. The number of Gascon speakers in south-western France increases steadily from north (Bordeaux) to south (the Pyrenees) and because Béarn is the area of linguistic Gascony with the highest recorded number of Gascon speakers (Moreux 2004), Béarnais may be considered the principal surviving dialect of Gascon, though other surviving dialects, such as ‘Gascon de Chalosse’, and ‘Landais’, are still spoken and written.

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).

Hamont is a small town located on the north-eastern edge of the Belgian province of Limburg, on the national border with the Netherlands. It is situated about 30 km south of Eindhoven and 15 km west of Weert in the Netherlands. The town has about 13,500 inhabitants. According to Belemans, Kruijsen & Van Keymeulen (1998), the dialect of Hamont belongs to the West Limburg dialects (subclassification: Dommellands). Limburg dialects occupy a unique position among the Belgian and Dutch dialects in that their prosodic system has a lexical tone distinction, which is traditionally referred to as SLEEPTOON ‘dragging tone’ and STOOTTOON ‘push tone’. In line with recent conventions, stoottoon is referred to as Accent 1 and transcribed as superscript 1; sleeptoon is referred to as Accent 2 and is transcribed as superscript 2 (cf. Schmidt 1986).

Dutch is a language spoken by about 20 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium. This region is not only characterised by a complex dialect situation, but also by the use of two institutionalised varieties of the Standard language: Netherlandic Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and is documented in Collins & Mees (1982), Mees & Collins (1983) and Gussenhoven (1999), while Belgian Dutch is spoken in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) by approximately 6 million speakers. This variety is the same as what is commonly referred to internationally as ‘Flemish’. However, the term ‘Flemish’ is avoided here since it erroneously suggests that this language is different from the one spoken in the Netherlands: the lexical and syntactic differences between the two language varieties are very small. Nevertheless, there are significant phonetic differences as well as substantial regional variability within the two speech communities.