John Wells’s phonetic blog

Lourdes Achard (blog, 27 Aug) also wrote I am a Phonetics teacher and am teaching linking /w/ and /j/ at the moment. Have you got any text t...

When in Barbados recently I learnt a new word, speleothem ˈspiːliəʊθem . It refers to any underground rock formation, more precisely to “se...

Lourdes Achard writes with two queries. One concerns the word humanitarian , transcribed in LPD as hjuˌmænɪˈteəriən but in the Cambridge EP...

Russ Stygall asks In the cases of the following FORCE words, do the compounds agree with the base forms in having the same sound [or]: force...

Dan Schneider asked: Do you happen to know what the difference is between /pænts/ and /pæns/ or /faɪ.næns/ and /faɪ.nænts/? Whenever I look ...

Two correspondents have separately drawn my attention to mysterious goings-on in Nevada, where a local politician is pressing for official r...

I enjoyed the recent Society for Caribbean Linguistics biennial conference in Barbados. Amongst other things, it offered plenty of opportun...