John Wells’s phonetic blog

If you hear a word spoken, but then want to write it down, you may be in some uncertainty how to spell it. At least in English, that is. If ...

For my sins (‘especially BrE’, according to LDOCE) I sit on the Steering Committee of the Government of Montserrat’s UK office in London. ...

Lipman asks about the possibilities of syllable-initial (love that word) t-glottalisation. Also, on television, I heard somebody say nʌɪnʔɪj...

London is in the throes of electing a new mayor. Reporting on the ITV news last night, the television presenter Alastair Stewart introduce...

Writing about yesterday’s proceedings at the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, the Guardian’s reporter Michael White describes the Russia...

Petr Rösel asks Do you still believe there’s no weak form for couldn’t (as you state in LPD)? To which my answer is yes, I do so believe. ...

In the boys’ adventure stories I would read sixty years ago, the baddies often spoke in ‘guttural’ tones. Not only German and Arabic, but al...