John Wells’s phonetic blog

My late aunt lived in a village on the edge of Doncaster called Bessacarr . You’d think it would be pronounced ˈbesəkɑː . But you’d be wrong...

Kevin Tang asked me about the pronunciation of the name of the Greek philosopher Aristotle . I pronounce it with the stress on the first syl...

People who write to the papers about language issues do get awfully confused. There’s been a good deal of discussion in the media recently a...

There are words that we read before we hear. We guess their pronunciation on the basis of the spelling. Unfortunately, the indications given...

Eighteen months ago (blog, 26 Aug 2008), I congratulated the Guardian newspaper on its newfound ability to cope with the typographical compl...

Phonetic symbols are not magic. And there is no super-phonemic system somewhere in the sky, consisting of universal sounds in one-to-one rel...

Philip Swan, an SIL-trained Australian phonetician, has put up a nice video on YouTube. It consists of three parts: using the IPA to trans...