John Wells’s phonetic blog

Edward Aveyard asked Would you happen to know how Towton (as in the Battle of Towton, the largest battle on English soil) is pronounced? I a...

Yesterday’s account of aspiration and VOT only covered initial consonants and initial consonant clusters: more precisely, those at the begin...

Carlos Leiva writes Could you speak about VOT in your blog next time? Drawing the differences between English and Spanish VOTs? While smokin...

In last Friday’s Guardian , Alexander Chancellor commented: It took the BBC all week to master the correct pronunciation of L'Aquila, th...

In his comment on my posting “punctuation in transcription” (9 April), Peter Roach referred to John Trim’s excellent 1959 article in m.f. 11...

Apropos writing an essay in transcription (blog, 6 April), Eric Armstrong asked And what do you do about things like question marks? Use pho...

Martin Ball writes I have a Speech Pathology colleague (of many years standing) who I have heard several times recently pronounce obstruent ...