Liverpool English (LE) is the variety of English spoken in Liverpool and much of the surrounding county of Merseyside, in the north-west of England. After London, the north-west of England is the most densely populated of all regions in England and Wales, with the population of Liverpool standing at around 450,000. LE itself is said to have developed in the middle of the 19th century, after rapid immigration from Ireland during the Irish potato famines of 1845–1847 (see Knowles 1973). Arguably as a result of this immigration, as we will see, there are some similarities between LE's phonological system and those of Irish Englishes. Of course, as we might expect, the phonological system of LE maintains its connection with other northern Englishes, too.

The Lizu (or Lüzu) language (/EP li-zu-hu/ or /EP ly-zu-hu/) is spoken by approximately 7000 people who reside along the banks of the Yalong (雅 砻) or Nyag chu River in three counties in Sichuan Province (四 川 省) in the People's Republic of China: (i) Muli Tibetan Autonomous County 木 里 藏 族 自 治 县 (Written Tibetan, hereafter WT, smi li rang skyong rdzong), (ii) Jiulong county (九 龙 县 brgyad zur), (iii) Mianning county (冕 宁 县) (Wang 2010: 3).1 Lizu is currently considered as the western dialect of the Ersu 尔 苏 language (Sun 1982, 1983), which is in turn classified as a member of the Qiangic subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman language family (for more details, see Bradley 1997: 36–37; Sun 2001; Chirkova 2012).

Dinka is a Western Nilotic language within the Nilo-Saharan family. There are over two million speakers (Gordon 2005). The Dinkas live along the banks of the White Nile and its tributaries in Southern Sudan. There are also communities elsewhere within Sudan, in particular in the capital Khartoum, and abroad. Cows play a key role in the Dinka economy, and also in the sociocultural system. Four major dialect areas are commonly distinguished: Padang, Rek, Agar, and Bor. The variety of Dinka represented here – Luanyjang or, as in Roettger & Roettger (1989), Luac – is part of the Rek dialect group. The term Luanyjang ‘Luac Dinka’ refers in the first place to a section within the Dinka ethnic group, and by extension also to their variety of the Dinka language. The main Luanyjang town is Wuncuei, located about 170 kilometers east of the city of Wau. Luanyjang has around 15000 speakers according to Ethnologue (Gordon 2005), although the current number is likely to be much higher.

Lusoga is an interlacustrine Bantu language spoken in the eastern part of Uganda in the region of Busoga, which is surrounded by the Victoria Nile in the west, Lake Kyoga in the north, the River Mpologoma in the east and Lake Victoria in the south. According to the 2002 census, this language is spoken by slightly over two million people (UBOS 2006: 12).

Luxembourgish (local language name: Lëtzebuergesch [ˈlətsəbuəjəʃ], French name: Luxembourgeois, German name: Luxemburgisch) is a small West-Germanic language mainly spoken in the multilingual speech community of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where it is one of the three official languages alongside German and French. Being the first language of most Luxembourgers it also has the status of the national language (since 1984). Although in its origin Luxembourgish has to be considered as a Central Franconian dialect, it is nowadays regarded by the speech community as a language of its own. As a consequence, German is considered a different language. An official orthographical system has been devised. Luxembourgish is used very frequently in day-to-day oral communication at all social levels; it is very common on local radio and television; it is the only language spoken in parliament sessions and it is also very often used at the workplace. Although the vocabulary of Luxembourgish has a substantial number of loan words from French and German, the morpho-syntax follows Germanic patterns. Luxembourgish today has approximately 400,000 speakers, including many L2 speakers (around 43% of the population does not have the Luxembourgish nationality).

Francoprovençal (known locally as patois) is the glottonym used as a cover term for a highly fragmented Romance dialect-grouping. These varieties are spoken in south-eastern France, and neighbouring parts of Switzerland and Italy; diasporic communities are also reported to maintain the use of Francoprovençal in Germany, Canada, and the United States (see Nagy 2011). Francoprovençal enjoys varying levels of official status across these regions. In France, for example, Francoprovençal was only recognised by the Ministry for Culture and Communication in 1999 as a ‘language of France’, but it does not constitute one of the handful of regional languages protected by law that are permitted in the education system. Conversely, in the Aosta Valley (Italy), which enjoys an autonomous status, Francoprovençal is protected under Federal law, and is taught in schools (see Josserand 2003).

Madurese (bhâsa Madhurâ) is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken primarily on the island of Madura and a number of regions in East Java, Indonesia. Its further subgrouping has remained a matter of some dispute. Early work placed Madurese in a Malayo-Javanic subgroup containing Javanese, Sundanese, and Malay (Dyen 1963). Glottolog and Ethnologue use the more recent ‘Malayo-Sumbawan’ classification (Adelaar 2005a), which puts Malayic, Chamic, and the Balinese-Sasak-Sumbawa group into one branch with Madurese and Sundanese in two other branches, to the exclusion of Javanese. Robert Blust, rejecting the Malayo-Sumbawan hypothesis, tentatively places Madurese in a Malayo-Chamic subgroup (Blust 2009), but also suggests (Blust 2010) that, as Madurese is lexically similar to Malay but phonologically and morphologically quite different, it may once have subgrouped with Javanese and later underwent heavy relexicalization due to language contact (see also discussion in Kluge 2017: 3).

Mah Meri (ãʔ məri) belongs to the Aslian branch of Mon-Khmer within the Austroasiatic family. It is classified as a Southern Aslian language, along with Semelai, Semoq Beri and Temoq (Benjamin 1976). Mah Meri is spoken by the Mah Meri ethnic group in scattered settlements along the south-west coast of the Malay peninsula stretching from Port Kelang to Bukit Bangkong, Sepang in the state of Selangor, Malaysia. The island of Sumatra lies a short distance away across the Malacca Strait. The Mah Meri language, which may have as many as 2,185 speakers, has no written tradition and is highly endangered.

Makasar is an Austronesian language belonging to the South Sulawesi subgroup within the large Western-Malayo Polynesian family. It is spoken by about two million people in the province of South Sulawesi in Indonesia, and is the second largest language on the island of Sulawesi (behind Bugis, with about three million speakers). The phonology is notable for the large number of geminate and pre-glottalised consonant sequences, while the morphology is characterised by highly productive affixation and pervasive encliticisation of pronominal and aspectual elements. The language has a literary tradition including detailed local histories (Cummings 2002), and over the centuries has been represented orthographically in many ways: with two indigenous Indic or aksara-based scripts, a system based on Arabic script, and a variety of Romanised conventions. From at least the early 18th century Macassan sailors travelled regularly to northern Australia to collect and process trepang or sea cucumber (Macknight 1976), and many loanwords passed into Aboriginal languages of the northern part of Australia (Evans 1992, 1997).

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).

Malayalam ( /m a l a j aːɭa m/; ISO 639) is a Dravidian language (Southern branch) spoken by over 33 million people in India, predominantly in Kerala (Lewis, Simmons & Fenning 2013). The language is diglossic, with the formal register used in written media and orally in formal settings. Colloquial Malayalam, for which there is no standard orthography, varies by region and social community (Asher & Kumari 1997). The speech illustrated below is representative of the variety spoken by the Namboodiri subcaste of Brahmins in and around Kochi, a city in central Kerala. The Namboodiri subcaste was traditionally a land-owning priestly class, and until relatively recently, the community was very insular. Consequently, the dialect differed from standard Malayalam as it is spoken today; this is discussed in some detail in U. Namboodiripad (1989, personal communication).

In the IPA Illustration ‘Malayalam (Namboodiri Dialect)’, the word transcribed as /v iʈi/ ‘let go’ in the section entitled ‘Vowels’ should have been transcribed as /v iʈu/. In addition, the gloss for the word /v iʈ/ in the same section should be ‘let go (informal)’.

Mambay is spoken by about 15,000 people in Cameroon and Chad. The majority of the population lives in the North Province of Cameroon, while the remaining group of 3,000 speakers is found immediately across the border in the Mayo-Kebbi Prefecture of southwestern Chad (Grimes 2000: 43, 68). There is little variation among dialects of the language.

Mapudungun (/m pʊðʊˈŋʊn/ or /m pʊθʊˈŋʊn/; also known as ‘Mapudungu’, ‘Mapuzugun’, ‘Mapuche’, ‘Mapuchedungun’, ‘Chedungun’ and ‘Araucanian’ or ‘Araucano’ (the latter two being archaic)) is a language isolate spoken actively by approximately 144,000 people in Chile (Zúñiga 2007), as well as by some 8,400 people in Argentina (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos 2005), virtually all of whom are bilingual in Spanish. Its ISO 639–3 code is arn.

Mavea is spoken on the eponymous island, Mavea, a satellite island off the east coast of Espiritu Santo Island, northern Vanuatu. The language is highly endangered. There are about 34 fluent speakers on Mavea Island (aged 30 and older), out of a total island population of around 210. There are at least another 30 Mavea speakers who have left the island permanently. These speakers now live throughout Vanuatu, mainly on Espiritu Santo Island (in the villages of Deproma and Matevulu), Aore Island, and in Port Vila, the capital city of Vanuatu. All Mavea speakers are bilingual in Bislama, one of the official languages of Vanuatu.

Mbarrumbathama is a clan-named variety of Lamalama, a language of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. Together with Umbuygamu (Ogilvie 1994, Sommer 1998, Verstraete 2017) and Rimanggudinhma (Godman 1993), Lamalama forms the Lamalamic subgroup of Paman languages (Laycock 1969, Rigsby 1997, Verstraete 2018), themselves a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (Hale 1964, 1966; see also Bowern & Atkinson 2012). The language is no longer spoken, but it is traditionally associated with about 20 clans (as reconstructed by Rigsby 1999, 2014) belonging to the southern shores of Princess Charlotte Bay, on the east coast of Cape York Peninsula (see Figure 1). The clans’ estates are mainly coastal, extending from the Normanby River mouth in the east to about 10 km west of the North Kennedy River mouth, but they also include some inland estates (see Rigsby 1992: 356).

Mennonite Plautdietsch (ISO 639–3: pdt) is a West Germanic (Indo-European) language belonging to the Low Prussian (Niederpreußisch) subgroup of Eastern Low German (Ostniederdeutsch), a continuum of closely related varieties spoken in northern Poland until the Second World War (Ziesemer 1924, Mitzka 1930, Thiessen 1963). Although its genetic affiliation with these other, now-moribund Polish varieties is uncontested, Mennonite Plautdietsch represents an exceptional member of this grouping. It was adopted as the language of in-group communication by Mennonites escaping religious persecution in northwestern and central Europe during the mid-sixteenth century, and later accompanied these pacifist Anabaptist Christians over several successive generations of emigration and exile through Poland, Ukraine, and parts of the Russian Empire. As a result of this extensive migration history, Mennonite Plautdietsch is spoken today in diasporic speech communities on four continents and in over a dozen countries by an estimated 300,000 people, primarily descendants of these so-called Russian Mennonites (Epp 1993, Lewis 2009).

Spanish is a Romance language spoken by approximately 405,638,110 speakers in the world (Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2013). Two major varieties are distinguished, Peninsular Spanish (Spain) and the Spanish spoken in the Americas, although it is also spoken natively in some parts of Africa, and in the United States. Spanish in the Americas comprises several dialects well differentiated by variations in the lexicon, phonology and, more importantly, in intonational patterns. In Mexico 86,211,000 (88% of the population) use Spanish as their first language, and a significant number of indigenous people have Spanish as their second language. The variety illustrated here is representative of the speech of the educated middle-class population from the metropolitan zone (three female and three male speakers in their 30s), which has as its center Mexico City, the most densely populated urban area in the country with more than 20 million people according to the Mexican National Census (INEGI 2010).

Mono is a Banda language spoken in the northwestern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is part of the larger Adamawa-Ubangi language family. The following description is based on the variety of the language spoken in Bili, Bosobolo Zone, DRC. Mono speakers consider this to be the most prestigious variety of the language. The sound inventory is relatively homogenous in Bili and the surrounding area. The orthography given here was approved by the Mono volunteer language development committee in 1994. Previous studies of Mono include Olson & Schrag (2000), Olson (2001) and Kamanda-Kola (2003).

Northern Paiute is a member of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken across the Great Basin in the western United States – from Mono Lake in California, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, through western Nevada and into southeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho, as well as in a discontinuous region in southeastern Idaho by the Bannock. There are, according to Golla (2011), about 300 first-language speakers of Northern Paiute. In this illustration, we describe the language's Mono Lake variety.