Bemba (also called Cibemba or Icibemba; ISO 639-3 code bem) is a Niger-Congo language belonging to the Central Narrow Bantu branch (Zone M in Guthrie's 1948, 1967–71 classification). Bemba is spoken in Zambia (mainly in the Northern, Luapula and Copperbelt provinces) and the Southern Democratic Republic of Congo by approximately 3.3 million speakers (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013). Our data are based on Bemba spoken in Zambia.

Bengali ( /baŋla/) is an Indo-European language (Indic branch) spoken by over 175 million people in Bangladesh and eastern India (Dasgupta 2003: 352; Lewis 2009). The speech illustrated below is representative of the standard variety widely spoken in Dhaka and other urban areas of Bangladesh.

Portuguese, a language of the Ibero-Romance subgroup of the Romance languages, has a variety which is spoken in Brazil, a country with circa 170 million inhabitants, of whom about 161 million speak Portuguese and 138 million live in cities. For this illustration of Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP), we have recorded a speaker whose choice was guided by two demographic criteria, namely, to represent the most populous dialectal region, that of São Paulo, and the most frequent age range (15–29 years, corresponding to 28% of the Brazilian population. Source: IBGE, Demographic census 2000). The speaker was a female undergraduate student at the University of Campinas at age 21 at the time of the recording. She was born in the city of São Paulo, where she lived up to age 10. From then on she has been living in Valinhos, a city on the outskirts of Campinas.

The accent described here is the present-day version of the accent that has been used as the standard in phoneticians' description of the pronunciation of British English for centuries. The definition of this accent is a matter of heated debate and frequent controversy: the arguments will not be rehearsed here, but the interested reader is recommended to look at Jones (1917 and subsequent) and Wells (2000). The most important aspects of this accent should, however, be made clear.

a. The number of native speakers of this accent who originate in Ireland, Scotland and Wales is very small and probably diminishing, and it is therefore a misnomer to call it an accent of BRITISH English. It is an accent spoken by some English people.

b. The great majority of native speakers of this accent are of middle-class or upper-class origin, educated at private schools and (if of appropriate age) university. This does not mean that the accent cannot be acquired by others: the present author (who attended a state school in the Midlands) originally spoke with an accent with noticeable regional features, but has over many years of teaching the phonetics of English acquired an accent not far from the standard one described here.

c. The majority of speakers of this accent live in, or originate from, the south-east of England.

d. The accent is most familiar as that used by most ‘official’ BBC speakers of English origin (newsreaders and announcers on Radio 4 and Radio 3, and most television channels). It is also frequently heard on the BBC World Service, though that service appears to have adopted the policy of sometimes using newsreaders and announcers with noticeable foreign accents. It is clear that this accent will eventually lose its pre-eminent status in broadcasting as a result of the wish to broaden the social base of broadcast speech, but it will take a long time for this to happen.

Brunei Malay (ISO 639-3: kxd) is spoken in the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam and also in some nearby places in East Malaysia such as Miri and Limbang in Sarawak (Asmah 2008: 65), on the island of Labuan (Jaludin 2003: 35) and around Beaufort in western Sabah (Saidatul 2003). Of the population of about 400,000 in Brunei, about two-thirds are native speakers of Brunei Malay (Clynes 2001), and the language is generally used as a lingua franca between the other ethnic groups (Martin 1996), so even most Chinese Bruneians, numbering about 45,000 (Dunseath 1996), are reasonably proficient in Brunei Malay. Although Standard Malay is promoted as the national language of Brunei (Clynes & Deterding 2011), in fact it is only used in formal situations, such as government speeches and television and radio broadcasts (Martin 1996). The language that is spoken most extensively is Brunei Malay, though English is also widely used by the educated elite (Deterding & Salbrina 2013).

Standard Tajik, or Modern Literary Tajik as it was called during the Soviet era, was established in the nineteen twenties and thirties based largely on the dialects of the Bukhara-Samarkand area, which was at the time the undisputed cultural centre of the Tajik-speaking population. Dushanbe, the current capital of Tajikistan, was then a small village with a population of only a few hundred and had no cultural heritage comparable to that of Bukhara or Samarkand. Bukharan Tajik, whose phonology is described in this paper, is a variety of Tajik that played a particularly influential role in the phonological standardization of Tajik, which took place for the most part in 1930. For instance, the Scientific Conference of Uzbekistan Tajiks of 1930 resolved that the dialect of Bukhara must be the designated basis of the sound and orthography of literary Tajik (вaroji tajjorī вa kanfiransijaji ilmiji istalinoвod 1930: 2). In August the same year, the Linguistic Conference held in the then newly established Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic also adopted a similar resolution that establishes the ‘language of the Tajiks of Samarkand and Bukhara’ as the reference point in establishing the literary (i.e. standard) pronunciation (Halimov 1974: 126). According to Bergne (2007: 82), ‘the same Linguistic Conference of 22 August 1930 in Stalinabad decided that the phonetic base for the language had better be the dialect of Bukhara’. Thus, the Bukharan Tajik of today is the direct descendant of the variety of Tajik which served as a primary basis of standard Tajik phonological norms; and hence differs little from standard Tajik phonologically and phonetically.

Burmese is the official language of Burma. (In English, ‘Burmese’ and ‘Burma’ are also known as ‘Myanmar’, and ‘Rangoon’ as ‘Yangon’.) It is the major language of the Burmic branch of Tibeto-Burman, and is spoken natively by upwards of 30 million people in the lower valleys of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin rivers, the central plain of Burma and the Irrawaddy Delta, and non-natively by up to another 10 million speakers of other languages in Burma.

Sardinian is a Romance language spoken almost exclusively on the island of Sardinia, an autonomous region of Italy. Sardinian and Italian are not mutually intelligible; there is considerable structural distance between the two linguistic systems, at all linguistic levels (Loporcaro 2009: 162–171).

Spanish is by far the most widely spoken Romance language, used by about 350 million people mainly in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. The language variety described below is formal Spanish spoken in Castile (Central Spain) by educated middle-aged speakers.

Central Arrernte is the language of an area centred on the present-day town of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It is one of a group of dialects or closely-related languages spoken or formerly spoken over most of the southeast quarter of the Northern Territory and extending on the east side into the far-western part of Queensland; a slightly less closely-related language extends south into the north-central part of South Australia. They include varieties using the names Anmatyerr, Alyawarr and Antekerrepenh as well as several varieties using the name Arrernte with (nowadays) English geographical qualifiers. The major surviving varieties, Eastern, Central and Western Arrernte, Eastern and Western Anmatyerr, Southern and Northern Alyawarr each have several hundred to a thousand speakers, and are still being learned by many of the children, who grow up bilingual (in English) or multilingual. Breen (2001) is a brief introduction to the phonology of these languages.

Lisu (ISO 639-2 lis) is spoken by just over a million members of the group of this name in south-western China, north-eastern Burma, northern Thailand and north-eastern India. It formerly also had other names used by outsiders, including Yeren (Chinese yeren ‘wild people’), and Yawyin in Burma and Yobin in India (both derived from the Chinese term). Other names included Lisaw from the Shan and Thai name for the group, also seen in the former Burmese name Lishaw. About two-thirds of the speakers live in China, especially in north-western Yunnan Province, but also scattered elsewhere in Yunnan and Sichuan. About a quarter live in the Kachin State and the northern Shan State in Burma, with a substantial number in Chiangmai, Chiangrai and other provinces of Thailand, and a few thousand in Arunachal Pradesh in India. It is also spoken as a second language by many speakers of Nusu, Anung, Rawang and others in north-western Yunnan and northern Burma. Lisu has almost completely replaced Anung in China and is replacing Lemei in China. The Lisu are one of the 55 national minorities recognised in China, one of 135 ethnic groups recognised in Burma, a scheduled (officially listed and recognised) tribe in India, and one of the recognised hill tribe groups of Thailand. Figure 1 shows a map of the area where Lisu is spoken.

Malagasy is the westernmost Austronesian language and belongs to the South East Barito subgroup of the Western Malayo-Polynesian subfamily (Dahl 1988, Rasoloson & Rubino 2005). Dahl (1951) presents widely-accepted evidence that Malagasy is most closely related to the Indonesian language Ma’anyan of Kalimantan (South Borneo). The term Malagasy refers to a macrolanguage (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2014), with many regional dialects distributed throughout the island of Madagascar, which lies off the east African coast across from Mozambique (see Figure 1) and has a population of over 22 million (INSTAT 2018). The central area of the country, or the ‘Central Highlands’, is a plateau of up to 5000 feet and includes the capital city of Antananarivo, with a metropolitan population of about four million. The dialect historically spoken in and around Antananarivo is called Merina, and it served as the primary basis for development of the standardized, institutional language referred to as Malagasy Ofisialy ‘Official Malagasy’ (OM).

Central Sama (ISO code sml) is spoken in the Philippines throughout the Sulu Archipelago and the Sibuguey Gulf to the north, and in many scattered communities as far north as Manila Bay. In Sabah, Malaysia, it is spoken primarily in the districts of Semporna and Kunak. For more information regarding the classification of this language within Austronesian, see Gordon (2005).

Chicahuaxtla Triqui [ i.kaˈwaks. a ˈtɾi.ki] or Nânj ǹï'ïn [nã 4 hnɯ1ʔɯ3] ‘the complete language’, as named by the Triqui people, is one of three languages in the Triqui subfamily of the Mixtecan family. The Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (INALI 2014; http://www.inali.gob.mx/clin-inali/) lists two other Triqui languages with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility for speakers of Chicahuaxtla Triqui (Casad 1974: 79) – the first is spoken in San Martín Itunyoso and the other in San Juan Copala.

Chickasaw is a Muskogean language spoken in south-central Oklahoma. Published descriptions of Chickasaw phonetics include Munro & Willmond (1994), Munro (to appear), and Gordon et al. (2000). The following description is a summary of the principal phonetic aspects of Chickasaw drawn primarily from these works.

The style of speech illustrated is that typical of the educated younger generation in Hong Kong. The recording is that of a 22-year-old female university student who has lived all her life in Hong Kong.

Chistabino is the variety of Aragonese, a Romance dialect descended from Latin, like Spanish, still spoken in the Valley of Gistau, bordering on France and formed by the River Cinqueta, in the central part of the Spanish Pyrenees (Province of Huesca). Although it is spoken mainly in the village of Gistaín (c. 240 inhabitants; c. 1400 m above sea-level, near latitude 42°35′), and is fairly well preserved by the older generations there, fluent speakers can still be found also in the nearby locality of San Juan. The other inhabited villages in the valley (Plan, Serveto, Sin and Saravillo) have suffered much greater degrees of erosion by Castilian (Standard Spanish), which has increased its influence through much improved communications, leading to the development of tourism in the area and emigration by the young in search of greater prosperity. The remaining village, Señes, has been uninhabited since 1970.

Cicipu ([tʃìtʃípù], ISO 639–3 code awc) is spoken by approximately 20,000 people in northwest Nigeria, with the main language area straddling the boundary between Kebbi and Niger states. The language belongs to the Kambari subgroup (not Kamuku as stated by Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013) of Kainji (Benue-Congo), although it is heavily influenced by the lingua franca Hausa, in which almost all speakers are fluent. There are several identifiable dialects, with native speakers of Cicipu generally listing seven. Of these, Tirisino is the most prestigious and least endangered dialect, and this is the one presented here. Tikumbasi is the most divergent of the dialects, with the /o/ vowel in the other dialects consistently corresponding to /e/ in Tikumbasi (for example /póːpò/ ‘hello’ ~ /péːpè/, /tʃìkóːtò/ ‘drum’ ~ /tʃìkʷéːtè/). The distinction between /o/ and /ɔ/ has been lost in Tikumbasi.