John Wells’s phonetic blog

It is only just over two months since I last discussed the question of foreign “accented letters” in ordinary spelling. We need them for loa...

…talking of which (yesterday’s blog), why is the dental fricative in brothel ˈbrɒθl̩ voiceless? There are two reasons why we might expect ...

Native speakers of English have no difficulty in hearing and making the difference between the FLEECE vowel and the KIT vowel. We effortless...

A collaborative US-NZ research project being carried out at the universities of Yale and Auckland is collecting data on different accents i...

The call centre for my bank is evidently located somewhere in Scotland. At any rate, every customer service officer I have spoken to there s...

Fred Cassidy (1907–2000) is best known among linguists as the moving force behind the Dictionary of American Regional English . A decade af...

The pronunciation of the suffix -ate is quite tricky from the EFL point of view. (NSs never think about it, of course.) The general rule is...