John Wells’s phonetic blog

On the BBC2 TV antiques show Flog It! a member of the public had brought in a silver-plated object she owned and that she was hoping to a...

Talking of confusing non-rhotic respellings (yesterday’s blog and comments), yesterday’s Independent newspaper had an interesting take on t...

It’s some time since I last discussed Montserratian Creole English (see 21 Nov 2006 here ) in this blog. But yesterday a news report on...

We sometimes use the punctuation mark “/”, normally unsurrounded by spaces, in running text. Here’s an example from my blog posting of 10 Oc...

In China and Japan, the term ‘keynote speech’ seems to have undergone serious grade inflation. At the Shanghai conference I alluded to yeste...

As I found in Shanghai, most people in mainland China cannot access my blog, because Blogspot is hosted on the Google ‘cloud’, which the C...

Ren Houbo writes to say that he is delighted with yesterday’s answers and examples, and is looking forward to hearing about handle . So he...