Malagasy is the westernmost Austronesian language and belongs to the South East Barito subgroup of the Western Malayo-Polynesian subfamily (Dahl 1988, Rasoloson & Rubino 2005). Dahl (1951) presents widely-accepted evidence that Malagasy is most closely related to the Indonesian language Ma’anyan of Kalimantan (South Borneo). The term Malagasy refers to a macrolanguage (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2014), with many regional dialects distributed throughout the island of Madagascar, which lies off the east African coast across from Mozambique (see Figure 1) and has a population of over 22 million (INSTAT 2018). The central area of the country, or the ‘Central Highlands’, is a plateau of up to 5000 feet and includes the capital city of Antananarivo, with a metropolitan population of about four million. The dialect historically spoken in and around Antananarivo is called Merina, and it served as the primary basis for development of the standardized, institutional language referred to as Malagasy Ofisialy ‘Official Malagasy’ (OM).

A’ingae (also known as Cofán or Kofán) is a language isolate spoken by approximately 1,500 people in 13 communities in Ecuador and Colombia (Figure 1). Traditionally, the A’i (speakers of A’ingae) lived in the Andean foothills, but over the past century they have migrated down the Aguarico and San Miguel rivers, founding communities at Dureno and Zábalo, where the language is most widely spoken. This migration was spurred in large part by extensive oil contamination; an issue of great concern to the Foundation for the Survival of the Cofán People (FSC) and the community at large (Cepek 2012: 103; 2018: 1–15). Another concern in the Cofán community is the decreasing use of A’ingae, which, according to Ethnologue (Simons & Fennig 2017), is ‘endangered’ in Ecuador and ‘severely endangered’ in Colombia as a growing emphasis on Spanish disincentivizes the younger generation from learning A’ingae.

Punjabi (Western, ISO-639-3 pnb) is an Indo-Aryan language (Indo-European, Indo-Iranian) spoken in Pakistan and India, and in immigrant communities in the UK, Canada, USA, and elsewhere. In terms of number of native speakers, it is ranked 10th among the world’s languages, with more than 100 million speakers (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016). Aspects of the phonology of different varieties of Punjabi have been described in Jain (1934), Arun (1961), Gill & Gleason (1962), Singh (1971), Dulai & Koul (1980), Bhatia (1993), Malik (1995), Shackle (2003), and Dhillon (2010). Much of this literature is focused on Eastern varieties, and the phonology of Western Punjabi dialects has received relatively less attention (e.g. Bahri 1962, Baart 2003, 2014).

Tongan (lea fakatonga, ISO 639-3 code ton) is a Polynesian language spoken mainly in Tonga, where it is one of two official languages (with English). There are about 104,000 speakers of the language in Tonga, with nearly 80,000 additional speakers elsewhere (Simons & Fennig 2017). It is most closely related to Niuean, and more distantly related to West Polynesian languages (such as Tokelauan and Samoan) and East Polynesian languages (such as Hawaiian, Māori, and Tahitian). Previous work on the phonetics and phonology of Tongan includes a general grammar (Churchward 1953), a dissertation with a grammatical overview (Taumoefolau 1998), a phonological sketch of the language (Feldman 1978), two dictionaries (Churchward 1959, Tu‘inukuafe 1992), journal and working papers on stress (Taumoefolau 2002, Garellek & White 2015), intonation (Kuo & Vicenik 2012), as well as the ‘definitive accent’ (discussed below) and the phonological status of identical vowel sequences (Poser 1985; Condax 1989; Schütz 2001; Anderson & Otsuka 2003, 2006; Garellek & White 2010; Ahn 2016; Zuraw 2018). This illustration is meant to provide an overview of the phonetic structures of the language, and includes novel acoustic data on its three-way word-initial laryngeal contrasts, which are cross-linguistically rare. The recordings accompanying this illustration come from Veiongo Hehepoto, a native speaker of Tongan currently living in Melbourne, Australia. Ms. Veiongo was born in 1950 on the island of Vava‘u (northern Tonga), but grew up and was educated in the capital city Nuku‘alofa on Tongatapu (see Figure 1). She moved to Vanuatu when she was 16 years old, and when she was 21 moved to Australia where she trained as a nurse. She continues to speak Tongan every day with family members (including children, who were born in Australia) and friends.

Malacca Portuguese Creole (MPC) (ISO 639-3; code: mcm), popularly known as Malacca Portuguese or locally as (Papiá) Cristang, belongs to the group of Portuguese-lexified creoles of (South)east Asia, which includes the extinct varieties of Batavia/Tugu (Maurer 2013) and Bidau, East Timor (Baxter 1990), and the moribund variety of Macau (Baxter 2009). MPC has its origins in the Portuguese presence in Malacca, and like the other creoles in this subset, it is genetically related to the Portuguese Creoles of South Asia (Holm 1988, Cardoso, Baxter & Nunes 2012).

Shawi1 is the language of the indigenous Shawi/Chayahuita people in Northwestern Amazonia, Peru. It belongs to the Kawapanan language family, together with its moribund sister language, Shiwilu. It is spoken by about 21,000 speakers (see Rojas-Berscia 2013) in the provinces of Alto Amazonas and Datem del Marañón in the region of Loreto and in the northern part of the region of San Martín, being one of the most vital languages in the country (see Figure 1).2 Although Shawi groups in the Upper Amazon were contacted by Jesuit missionaries during colonial times, the maintenance of their customs and language is striking. To date, most Shawi children are monolingual and have their first contact with Spanish at school. Yet, due to globalisation and the construction of highways by the Peruvian government, many Shawi villages are progressively westernising. This may result in the imminent loss of their indigenous culture and language.

Sardinian is a Romance language spoken almost exclusively on the island of Sardinia, an autonomous region of Italy. Sardinian and Italian are not mutually intelligible; there is considerable structural distance between the two linguistic systems, at all linguistic levels (Loporcaro 2009: 162–171).

Seenku (ISO 639-3: sos) is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group, whose other members include languages like Dzùùngoo (Solomiac 2014), Jowulu (Djilla, Eenkhoorn & Eenkhoorn-Pilon 2004), and Duungooma (Hochstetler 1996), spoken on either side of the Mali-Burkina Faso border. The endonymic language name Seenku [sɛ̃́ː-kû] (also spelled on Ethnologue as Seeku) literally means ‘thing of the Sɛ̃ː ethnicity’, but it is widely known to outsiders as Sembla (variant spelling Sambla), which doubles as an exonym for the ethnicity. Seenku has two primary dialects, Northern and Southern, spoken in villages approximately 40 km west of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso (see map in Figure 1). This study focuses on the more populous southern dialect, particularly the variety spoken in and around the large village center of Bouendé (local name [ɡ͡béné-ɡũ̏]), with a population of approximately 12,000 speakers; the Northern dialect, spoken around the village center of Karangasso (local name [təmî]), has a population of approximately 5000 speakers and was the subject of a sketch grammar (Prost 1971). The southern dialect had until recently received little scholarly attention, with the exception of a Master's thesis on the morphophonology at the Université de Ouagadougou (Congo 2013), but is now the subject of the NSF Documenting Endangered Languages grant supporting this research (BCS-1664335). Other published work includes McPherson (2017a, b, c, d).

The Hmu language is spoken by approximately 1,250,000 people who reside in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture (黔东南苗族侗族自治州), Guizhou Province (贵州省), the People's Republic of China (Wang & Mao 1995: 3–4; Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2016).

Of the official languages of South Africa, Afrikaans has the widest geographical, demographic and racial distribution (Webb 2003). According to the latest South African census of 2011 (StatsSA 2012), Afrikaans as first language is spoken by 13.5% of the country's inhabitants, only surpassed in numbers by Zulu (22.7%) and Xhosa (16%). In neighbouring Namibia, 10.4% of the population has Afrikaans as their first language. A noteworthy number of recent emigrants to United Kingdom, Australia, Europe and North America are likely to be Afrikaans speakers as well.1 A handful of elderly persons in Patagonia still speak Afrikaans; they are descendants of some 600 Afrikaans speakers who settled in Patagonia at the beginning of the 20th century (Du Toit 1995, Coetzee et al. 2018).

Madurese (bhâsa Madhurâ) is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken primarily on the island of Madura and a number of regions in East Java, Indonesia. Its further subgrouping has remained a matter of some dispute. Early work placed Madurese in a Malayo-Javanic subgroup containing Javanese, Sundanese, and Malay (Dyen 1963). Glottolog and Ethnologue use the more recent ‘Malayo-Sumbawan’ classification (Adelaar 2005a), which puts Malayic, Chamic, and the Balinese-Sasak-Sumbawa group into one branch with Madurese and Sundanese in two other branches, to the exclusion of Javanese. Robert Blust, rejecting the Malayo-Sumbawan hypothesis, tentatively places Madurese in a Malayo-Chamic subgroup (Blust 2009), but also suggests (Blust 2010) that, as Madurese is lexically similar to Malay but phonologically and morphologically quite different, it may once have subgrouped with Javanese and later underwent heavy relexicalization due to language contact (see also discussion in Kluge 2017: 3).

Lisu (ISO 639-2 lis) is spoken by just over a million members of the group of this name in south-western China, north-eastern Burma, northern Thailand and north-eastern India. It formerly also had other names used by outsiders, including Yeren (Chinese yeren ‘wild people’), and Yawyin in Burma and Yobin in India (both derived from the Chinese term). Other names included Lisaw from the Shan and Thai name for the group, also seen in the former Burmese name Lishaw. About two-thirds of the speakers live in China, especially in north-western Yunnan Province, but also scattered elsewhere in Yunnan and Sichuan. About a quarter live in the Kachin State and the northern Shan State in Burma, with a substantial number in Chiangmai, Chiangrai and other provinces of Thailand, and a few thousand in Arunachal Pradesh in India. It is also spoken as a second language by many speakers of Nusu, Anung, Rawang and others in north-western Yunnan and northern Burma. Lisu has almost completely replaced Anung in China and is replacing Lemei in China. The Lisu are one of the 55 national minorities recognised in China, one of 135 ethnic groups recognised in Burma, a scheduled (officially listed and recognised) tribe in India, and one of the recognised hill tribe groups of Thailand. Figure 1 shows a map of the area where Lisu is spoken.

Mbarrumbathama is a clan-named variety of Lamalama, a language of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. Together with Umbuygamu (Ogilvie 1994, Sommer 1998, Verstraete 2017) and Rimanggudinhma (Godman 1993), Lamalama forms the Lamalamic subgroup of Paman languages (Laycock 1969, Rigsby 1997, Verstraete 2018), themselves a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (Hale 1964, 1966; see also Bowern & Atkinson 2012). The language is no longer spoken, but it is traditionally associated with about 20 clans (as reconstructed by Rigsby 1999, 2014) belonging to the southern shores of Princess Charlotte Bay, on the east coast of Cape York Peninsula (see Figure 1). The clans’ estates are mainly coastal, extending from the Normanby River mouth in the east to about 10 km west of the North Kennedy River mouth, but they also include some inland estates (see Rigsby 1992: 356).

Sasak is a Malayo-Sumbawan (Adelaar 2005) language spoken as a primary language in Lombok, Indonesia (see the map in Figure 1). It is estimated to be spoken by 2 million (Clynes 1995) or 2.5 million (Marli 2015) people. Sasak is reported to have four (Jacq 1998) or five (Austin 2003) major dialects, to which Austin (2003) gives informal names based on the pronunciation of the deictic words for ‘like this’ and ‘like that’: Ngenó-Ngené (central northeast, central east, and central west coasts of Lombok), Menó-Mené (central Lombok), Ngotó-Ngeté (northeastern Lombok), Ngenó-Mené, also known as Kutó-Kuté (north Lombok), and Meriaq-Meriku (south central Lombok). The dialects with the broadest geographical distribution are Menó-Mené and Ngenó-Ngené.

Kumiai (Kumeyaay, formerly known as Diegueño; ISO code: DIH) is an endangered Yuman language of the Delta-California subgroup spoken across the Mexico–US border by approximately 150 people (Golla 2011). There are two major sets of Kumiai varieties: Northern Kumiai (Ipai/’Iipay) and Southern Kumiai (Tipai/Tiipay) (Golla 2011). A third cluster of varieties, located in southeastern San Diego County, is proposed in Langdon (1991) and Miller (2001). The speech illustrated below is representative of Ja’a, a Southern Kumiai dialect spoken in Juntas de Nejí, Baja California, Mexico (see Figure 1 below). There are currently only four fluent speakers of Ja’a Kumiai (Miller 2016b). Recordings were made over a six-month period with a 48-year-old female speaker born and raised in Juntas de Nejí. Quantitative data reported in this paper are taken from a subset of the current corpus, from recordings made with the speaker in a soundproof booth. Only the speech of this single speaker is reported here given the severe endangerment of the language.

English is an official language in the Philippines, along with Filipino, a standardized register originally based on Tagalog (Gonzalez 1998). The Philippines were a Spanish colony for over three centuries, but when the Americans took control in 1898, they immediately implemented English instruction in schools (Gonzalez 2004). It became much more widespread among Filipinos than Spanish ever was, and by the late 1960s, Philippine English was recognized as a distinct, nativized variety (Llamzon 1969). It is widely spoken throughout the country as a second language, alongside Filipino and approximately 180 other languages (Lewis, Simmons & Fennig 2016). It is also spoken in the home by a small number of Filipinos, especially among the upper class in Metro Manila (Gonzalez 1983, 1989) and other urban areas. There is a large body of literature on Philippine English. However, relatively few studies have focused on its sound system. The most detailed phonological descriptions of this variety have been by Tayao (2004, 2008), although there have also been previous sketches (Llamzon 1969, 1997; Gonzalez 1984). There has been very little phonetic research on Philippine English, apart from some work describing the vowel system (Pillai, Manueli & Dumanig 2010, Cruz 2015).

Niuean (ISO 639-3 code niu) is a Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue, with an additional population of speakers living in New Zealand. Figure 1 indicates where Niue is located with respect to other neighboring islands in the South Pacific. The 2011 Niue Census of Populations and Households cited the number of individuals who had either basic or fluent spoken abilities at 1121 (with 101 non-speakers) (Statistics Niue 2012). English is the second most widely used language on the island. The 2013 New Zealand census cited 4548 individuals living in New Zealand who listed Niuean as one of their languages (Statistics New Zealand 2013). Niuean is classified as ‘definitely endangered’ by UNESCO (Moseley 2010). There are historically two distinct dialects: the older Motu dialect from the northern area, and the more recent Tafiti from the southern area. These dialect differences were once reflected in slight phonological differences in vocabulary items, but the differences have since eroded in the modern language (see McEwen 1970: ix). Previous research on Niuean phonetics and phonology includes a brief outline in Seiter (1980: x), two dictionaries (McEwen 1970, Sperlich 1997), and an article on vowel length (Rolle & Starks 2014). While these works provide an overview of some of the phenomena to be addressed below, this sketch attempts a more thorough documentation of the phonetic structures of Niuean, and provides novel acoustic and articulatory data from the language. Recordings accompanying this paper are of a male speaker (Mr. Krypton Okesene) and a female speaker (the second author).

Asturian (ISO 639), also known as Bable, Asturiano, Asturianu, Astur-Leonese or Leonese, is the vernacular language of Principality of Asturias, an autonomous community of just over one million inhabitants located in Northern Spain. Asturian is spoken by approximately 100,000 individuals within Asturias plus a few thousand more outside of this region. Historically, Astur-Leonese was spoken in parts of the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora and there are still remnants of it in Castilian Spanish. In addition, a variety of Asturian – called Mirandés – is currently spoken in the Portuguese province of Miranda de Douro, where it is a language co-official with Portuguese (Figure 1).

Although Spanish is a relatively unified language, in the sense that people from very distant locations manage to understand each other well, there are several phonetic phenomena that distinguish geographically separated varieties. The total number of native speakers of Spanish is above 400 million, and roughly 10% of them live in Argentina (Instituto Cervantes 2014). The accent described below corresponds to formal Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, and the main allophones are indicated by parentheses in the Consonant Table. The recordings are from a 49-year-old college-educated male speaker, who has lived all his life in either the city of Buenos Aires or the province of Buenos Aires.

Tianjin Mandarin is a member of the northern Mandarin Chinese family (ISO 693-3: [cmn]). It is spoken in the urban areas of the Tianjin Municipality (CN-12) in the People's Republic of China, which is about 120 kilometers to the southeast of Beijing. Existing studies on Tianjin Mandarin have focused mainly on its tonal aspects, especially its intriguing tone sandhi system, with few studies examining the segmental aspects (on tone, see e.g. Li & Liu 1985, Shi 1986, Liu 1993, Lu 1997, Wang & Jiang 1997, Chen 2000, Liu & Gao 2003, Ma 2005, Ma & Jia 2006, Zhang & Liu 2011, Li & Chen 2016; on segmental aspects, see e.g. Han 1993a, b; Wee, Yan & Chen 2005). As also noted in Wee et al. (2005), this is probably due to the similarity in segmental structures between Tianjin Mandarin and Standard Chinese, especially among speakers of the younger generation, and what differentiates the two Mandarin varieties is most notably their tonal systems. The aim of the present description is therefore to provide a systematic phonetic description of both segmental and tonal aspects of Tianjin Mandarin, with main focus on the tonal aspects.