Ladefoged (2001)

Peter Ladefoged (2001). Vowels and consonants: an introduction to the sounds of languages. Oxford: Blackwell. [second edition: 2005; third edition with Sandra Disner: 2012]

A very readable introduction to phonetics, mainly acoustic and articulatory. Has lots of spectrograms of the sounds of the world’s languages. Comes with a CD that has all those sounds and includes training material for transcription (from another book).

For a more encyclopaedic treatment of the sounds of the world’s languages, see Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996) instead.

### Links to this page

- Intro 3.1. Viewing a spectrogram