A hundred years from now a large number of presently spoken languages will no longer be viable means of communication, and the distinctive sounds that they contain will have disappeared. Of the nearly seven thousand languages in the world listed by Grimes (1992), about ten per cent are spoken by around a thousand people or less. As the speakers of these languages grow old, and their children go to schools in which the main languages of the country predominate, phoneticians will no longer have access to the wide variety of sounds currently in use. Toda, a language spoken by about a thousand speakers in the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India, has some unusual sounds that will probably not exist in our great grandchildren's times. Among them are the six trills which this paper will describe. Tongue tip trills occur in about one third of the world's languages (Maddieson 1984). None of the languages in Maddieson's sample has two contrasting apical trills without secondary articulations, although they have been reported in Malayalam (Ladefoged 1971). To the best of our knowledge only Toda has three contrasting trills; and almost certainly no other language has surface contrasts between palatalized and non-palatalized versions of three lingual trills. Toda is a rich source for trill-seeking phoneticians.

The perception of speaker sex depends on the listener's integration of a complex range of factors. These may relate, for example, to the style of delivery, the use of particular language, pronunciation (Trudgill, 1983; Smith, 1979), the use of particular intonation patterns (McConnell-Ginet, 1983) and the perceived pitch of the speaker (Aronovitch, 1976, Elyan, 1978; Lass et al., 1976). Some acoustic-phonetic investigations have explored through instrumental analysis how speaker sex differences are perceived. These have shown that acoustic phonetic differences exist between the read speech of men and women speakers. It has been demonstrated that fundamental frequency differences exist between men and women, with men having on average, lower fundamental frequencies (Aronovitch, 1976; Coleman, 1973a). This can be explained in part by their larger larynges. However it is also acknowledged that it is not a low overall average fundamental frequency alone that contributes to the perception of an adult male voice. Some evidence shows for example that use of a wider pitch range will contribute to the perception of femininity, even where the overall pitch is low (Terrango, 1966). In addition women have been found to have on average higher formant frequencies (Coleman, 1976; Henton, 1986; Peterson & Barney, 1952; Childers & Wu, 1991; Wu & Childers, 1991) as a result of the smaller vocal tract. Women have different glottal source characteristics (Karlsson, 1989) which are reflected in the filter characteristics of the speech signal (Klatt & Klatt, 1990). There is also some evidence to suggest that other speaker sex differences exist in the temporal domain. Byrd (1992) found differences between men and women speakers in speaking rate in read speech in American English in the TIMIT database. Byrd states that under the recording conditions used for the TIMIT database, women spoke appreciably more slowly than the men and that men tended to reduce vowels to schwa ([ə]) more often than the women. Byrd also found that female speakers in the TIMIT database released stops in sentence-final position more frequently and produced more glottal stops than male speakers. All these findings were statistically significant.

This paper aims at describing the click accompaniments of |Gui, a little known Central Khoisan language, and presenting some new findings which may contribute to general phonetics as well as Khoisan linguistics. The phonetic features described here are based upon linguistic field research by the author into the |Gui language in the Xade area, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana, from August to December in 1992, from August to October in 1993 and from August to December in 1994.

Taba (also known as ‘East Makian’ or ‘Makian Dalam’) is an Austronesian language spoken in northern Maluku province, Indonesia. It is spoken on Makian, Moti and Kayoa islands and also in a few villages on other nearby islands. The speech recorded here is from the village of Ngofakiaha on Makian island. Slight dialectal variations are to be found in most villages where the language is spoken.