John Wells’s phonetic blog

An anonymous commentator on yesterday’s blog (why don’t people identify themselves?) wrote Russian ж is a retroflex, so shouldn't we use...

In transliterating Russian names, the question arises what to do about Cyrillic ж, IPA ʒ , the voiced palatoalveolar fricative. The usual co...

Today’s entry is not so much about pronunciation as about spelling. There are several English verbs that we can spell confidently in their b...

Can you spot the repeated spelling mistake in this, from Saturday’s Guardian magazine section? Yes, it ought to be mycorrhizae and mycorrhi...

On behalf of Akiko Ohkita, one of his students, Masaki Taniguchi asks what would be an appropriate intonation pattern for the phrase I have ...

Paul Reed, writing from South Carolina, says I heard on the radio today an interesting statement. The DJ said,'The jury is out, and I do...

For you, does room rhyme with tomb, boom and zoom , or not? In one of my preference surveys (1988), 81% of my British respondents said ‘ye...