Reviewed by Mikael Thompson, Bloomington, IN

Richard Ogden’s textbook introduces phonetics on a level appropriate to advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students using examples drawn exclusively from varieties of English. ‘It is not a complete description of any one variety; rather, my intention has been to try to provide enough of a descriptive phonetic framework so that readers can describe their own variety in reasonable detail’ (xi). While providing a thorough survey of English segmental phonetics, prosodic features are largely excluded.

After a brief introductory chapter, Ch. 2, ‘Overview of the human speech mechanism’ (7–19), introduces the anatomy of speech production, including voice production and the manner and place of articulation of consonants. Ch. 3, ‘Representing the sounds of speech’ (20–38), discusses phonetic transcription and sound spectrographs. Detailed discussion of the sounds of speech begins in Ch. 4, ‘The larynx, voicing and voice quality’ (40–55), which covers voicing, fundamental frequency, intonation, and voice quality.

The remainder of the book discusses the major classes of sounds: vowels (Ch. 5, 56–77), approximants (Ch. 6, 78–95), plosives (Ch. 7, 96–117), fricatives (Ch. 8, 118–37), nasals (Ch. 9, 138–53), and finally glottalic and velaric consonants (Ch. 10, 154–69); affricates are discussed in both Chs. 7 and 8. Following a short conclusion are a glossary and discussion of the exercises. Although the chapters are relatively short, they contain a great amount of information presented clearly and thoroughly.

This book does not cover the physics of speech production or many important details of instrumental phonetics: e.g. the ‘velar pinch’ is only briefly touched upon in a discussion of [ŋ] (143) and representative release-burst frequencies of plosives are only mentioned in a discussion of clicks (156–57). Moreover, instructors will need to correct a handful of errors: the caption to Fig. 3.6 is wrong (35), pitch contours are mislabeled in two examples (46), and a discussion of dialectal variation in the pronunciation of ‘finger’ vs. ‘singer’ is marred by transcribing [ŋg] throughout (146).

However, these are minor faults weighed against many virtues of the book. O’s discussions of degrees of broadness in transcription and the principles of the international phonetic alphabet (IPA), a detailed summary of vowel variation in five major English dialects, secondary articulations in liquids and plosives, and correlates of voicing in fricatives are especially noteworthy. The sociolinguistic discussions of particular points (e.g. certain intonation patterns, voice quality, glottalization, and ejectives) are handled well and are welcome in an introductory phonetics textbook. There are relatively few exercises, but they are well-chosen. This is a superb textbook that could be used equally well in introductory phonetics classes or classes on the varieties of English.