''The Sounds of the World's Languages'', sometimes abbreviated ''SOWL'', is a 1996 book by

Peter Ladefoged Peter Nielsen Ladefoged ( , ; 17 September 1925 – 24 January 2006) was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book '' A Course ...

and

Ian Maddieson Ian Maddieson (1 September 1942 – 2 February 2025) was a British-American Linguistics, linguist and professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of New Mexico. He is best known for his work in phonetics and phonological Linguistic typolo ...

which documents a global survey of the sound patterns of natural languages. Drawing from the authors' own fieldwork and experiments as well as existing literature, it provides an articulatory and acoustic description of

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

s and

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

s from more than 300 languages. It is a prominent reference work in the field of

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

. Following discussions of the book's aim and underlying frameworks, the description of sounds is divided into chapters on stops, nasals and nasalized consonants,

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

s, laterals, rhotics, clicks, vowels, and multiple articulatory gestures, which are then followed by a discussion of the data's

phonological Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often prefer ...

implications.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sounds Of The World's Languages, The 1996 non-fiction books Phonetics books Phonology books Wiley-Blackwell books book-stub