John Wells’s phonetic blog

Here’s a nice little video from YouTube . It’s an advertisement for CNN, in which Christine Amanpour purports to attempt to teach the approv...

Emilio Marquez writes I would like to ask you about the rhythmic patterns of … words [such as irritating ]. If Spanish speakers are asked to...

There are two English words beginning inter- which have an unexpected stressing: interpret and interstice . Looking at the spelling you mi...

In response to Wednesday’s blog Eric Armstrong wrote: Today you said "If it is essential to symbolize the central quality explicitly, t...

I have just had to remind someone not to confuse the phonetic symbols ɤ and ɣ . The first, ɤ , is the symbol for a back close-mid unrounded...

Lipman asked (blog comments, 21 Sep): About [ɐ] - what would you say is the first vowel in German aber ? The word is usually transcribed as ...

Here is an impressive video of an Englishman going by the name of Torbyrne, who can speak sixteen languages. (Thanks to Giridhar Rao for th...