This very well-received book, first published in 2003 and undoubtedly now the leading text in its field, has undergone a considerable revision. It now has sixty more pages than in its first edition. It also has a re-designed website but continues to come with an attached audio CD. It has an attractive cover design. The book is the work of a remarkably successful thirty-year writing partnership between Beverley Collins and Inger Mees. Among the authors’ previous achievements have been an excellent book on the phonetics of English and Dutch (Collins & Mees Reference Collins and Mees2003) and, of special interest to many JIPA readers, their splendid volume on Daniel Jones entitled The Real Professor Higgins (Collins & Mees Reference Collins and Mees1999). No less an authority than the late Peter Ladefoged was quoted in these pages describing this biography as ‘a great book’ (Ladefoged 2005: 137).
Practical Phonetics and Phonology is an outstanding practical coursebook on pronunciation for students of British English as an additional language. This book and Peter Roach's English Phonetics and Phonology (Roach Reference Roach2009) cover much the same basic ground but Collins & Mees set out to extend their treatment a good deal more widely. They are both primarily concerned to give an account of British pronunciation of which they provide excellent detailed descriptions. Both books have eschewed the term ‘Received Pronunciation’, but Collins & Mees use their own term ‘non-regional pronunciation’. Although ‘NRP’, as they regularly abbreviate it, avoids the sociological invidiousness of ‘RP’, it lacks geographic specificity and rather awkwardly seems to suggest that it encapsulates the older term. More suitable than these would, in my view, have been ‘General British’, the term that Gimson (Reference Gimson1980: 303fn.) remarked ‘may in time supersede’ RP and now indeed does so in Cruttenden's (Reference Cruttenden2014) latest revision of the Introduction to the Pronunciation of English as its eighth edition.
The first of the four main divisions in Practical Phonetics and Phonology, ‘Introduction’, is devoted to explaining basic concepts and terminology. Readers, many of whom will be likely to find the terms new to them, would be helped by being given pronunciations for the words acro-, basi- and meso-lectal especially as they’re used fairly freely in the subsequent text. It is surprising that such help is not given here because later in the book it is generally provided e.g. at arytenoid, trachea etc. Justification for the word ‘practical’ in the book's title begins to appear early on in the authors’ use within this first section of three lively illustrative texts (with transcripts in ordinary spelling) of recordings provided on the CD. Some of these passages of between two and three hundred words are not merely effective but positively entertaining, notably the first of them, which is an interview with an old Etonian whose endearingly unaffected-sounding ‘posh’ speech illustrates what they label as ‘“Traditional Received” Pronunciation’. A subsection ‘English worldwide’ is illustrated by a convenient simple map, the first of a number supplied throughout the text, some original and others borrowed, including ones showing British and Irish accent distributions and world accent varieties. Another subsection, ‘Phoneme, allophone and syllable’, has nine interspersed boxes prescribing further practical ‘Activities’, several of which have ‘Answers on website’. Yet another subsection, on ‘Connected speech and phonemic transcription’, has two single-page tables, one of weak and the other of contracted forms. This commendable conciseness seems to go a step too far in the omission of the weak form of but, consequently sanctioning use of an unnatural-sounding pronunciation of this so extremely frequent word. The other recommended weak forms seem to be a judiciously chosen adequate set. Phonemic transcriptions are now introduced and set as exercises to be transcribed from spoken texts. A dozen of these, of about ten lines each, are distributed throughout the two first main sections of the book. They are all taken from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, an effective choice because the language has the simplicity of ordinary conversation even if the amount of actual direct speech in them is very small indeed. They are well delivered without artificiality. More varied subject matter is to be found in the extra passages provided at the book's accompanying website (www.routledge.com/cw/collins). The rest of this first part of the book, entitled ‘How we produce speech’, deals with ‘Consonant and vowel possibilities’. The book as a whole is quite outstanding for its generous provision of various kinds of tables, diagrams, and vowel charts – well over 200 figures in all.
One of the basic features of the series into which this book was incorporated (Routledge English Language Introductions) has been the aim to facilitate the digesting of its main topics by having them presented in two distinct stages. Thus, we next find the second stage, entitled ‘Development’, revisiting the topics of the first in greater depth. It begins by extending the coverage of allophones and viewing the vowel and consonant systems overall. It continues with miscellaneous topics, including an investigation of syllable structures, guidance on the interpretation of spellings, and an examination of aspects of connected speech. These last deal with sentence and word stress, containing some particularly useful practical advice, such as rather original recommendations on the stressing of compound words. In this section, as the authors turn to connected speech, we are specially aware that they not only aim to use straightforward language but are even on occasion not reluctant to introduce terms of their own when they consider them more memorable or comfortably comprehensible than something more traditional. A notable example of this is their preference for describing assimilations as ‘leading’ or ‘lagging’ rather than ‘regressive’ or ‘progressive’. Their final one of these topics, ‘speech melody’, provides what some might find is a little too concisely outlined account of this rather difficult area. The terminology and symbology for it are chosen eclectically from among the well-known alternatives to be found in the literature. The simplified coverage they adopt elects to ignore stressings between ‘onset’ and ‘nucleus’. This completes the first and major half of the book.
The book's third section, ‘Exploration’, begins with outline accounts of the kinds of English spoken in the rest of the British Isles and beyond, and is accompanied by liberal sets of illustrations of accents, all unscripted recordings of native speakers supplied with normal-spelling transcripts and analytical descriptions. These first cover Edinburgh, Dublin, Belfast, Carmarthenshire and Liverpool. Next are mentioned American varieties – besides General American, they include Texas, Kentucky, and New York. They then proceed to Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian, Singaporean, Caribbean, and West African types. Free use is made of the Wells lexical sets (more appropriately than is now usual) in their original application for inter-variety comparisons. Here again we find vowel charts and maps liberally provided. These explorations are followed by excursions into pronunciation changes ‘past, present and future’, with spoken samples of Old English, Middle English, Elizabethan and eighteenth-century pronunciations, and a variety of more modern types. The rest of this third division deals at length with the various problems in acquiring an English pronunciation experienced by native speakers of other languages. Taken as particular examples are speakers of Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese and Polish.
Sound files are to be found on the website with ‘native speakers providing illustrative examples of the consonants and vowels of the foreign languages discussed in the book’. This is in line with the satisfying policy of using genuine native speakers in their illustrations of the 25 worldwide accent varieties and has even extended to some of the illustrations of foreign sounds earlier on. I found some of the Welsh examples questionable. Also on the website are to be found a variety of supplementary materials to those provided by the 71 tracks of various lengths on the CD. These include keys to exercises and transcriptions in the text as well as extra items of the same types. A novel section likely to be popular is an ‘interactive flashcard glossary … to test students’ knowledge of essential terminology’.
The fourth and final section of the book, entitled ‘Extension’, is devoted to ten extracts, each several pages long, on a stimulating variety of topics from the writings of mainly leading figures in the past and present of the field of English phonetics, including David Abercrombie, Daniel Jones, David Crystal, Dennis Fry, Peter Ladefoged, John Wells and Peter Trudgill. The subjects include matters as diverse as attitudes to accents, spelling reform (a brilliant piece by Wells), controversial individual words, ‘talking computers’ and phonetics as used in teaching the deaf, and as in criminal investigations. Each is followed by a set of questions on the extract and suggestions of ‘issues to consider’.
The book ends with a useful dozen pages of glossary, several pages of recommendations for further reading which include a full page of websites, and an index covering ten double-column pages. Although this very remarkable work is not primarily aimed at native speakers of English, it can very well be commended to students of general phonetics as at least an auxiliary text.
