This chapter explores how Black youth in the British colony of Bermuda engaged decolonization, Black Power, and Black internationalism through Reggae, Dancehall, and sound system culture in the “global 1990s.” Centered on a racially charged 1995 referendum on independence in which, out of 58.8 percent of eligible voters, 73.6 percent voted against and 25.7 percent voted for independence, it argues that it is critical to explore Black anticolonialism through soundscapes and not just ballot politics, as Black Bermuda is a sonic culture. The era’s Reggae sound system clashes often invoked long-standing racial and colonial tensions, such as one between Bermuda’s Souljah One and British DJ David Rodigan. Through archives drawn from print media, government surveillance, and audio recordings, it shows that while sound system culture could not “free decolonization,” it played a crucial role in galvanizing the Black and working-class Progressive Labor Party’s youth base in its first political victory in 1998.

This chapter introduces the Chinese sound system, with a focus on syllable structure. An overview of the nature and distribution of Chinese initial consonants, finals, and tones is introduced, and the rules of tone sandhi are also explained.

Chapter 3 first summarizes the differences between phonetics (Chapter 2), which looks at human speech sounds in general, and phonology, which examines how a subset of possible sounds is used and distributed in specific languages. It introduces the concept of the phonological unit, the phoneme, and how phonemes can be identified by minimal pairs, that is, comparing words that differ by only one sound yet have distinct meanings. It also explains the difference between phonemes and allophones that are typically the result of sound processes, as seen in Chapter 2, but may also be in free variation. We then explain how phonemes can be reduced to a limited set of distinctive features that allow us to organize them into natural classes to which phonological rules may be applied. We see how these rules can be represented easily to capture important generalizations about phonology. The chapter also examines the structure of syllables and explains how different languages may syllabify words and phrases in different ways, while at the same time obeying universal principles. The chapter ends with a section on how to discover the sound system of a language.