Elizabeth Zsiga's The Sounds of Languages: An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology is a complete textbook for both introductory phonetics and introductory phonology courses, targeted at upper-level undergraduate and early graduate students. The book is comprised of two sections, with the first nine chapters devoted mainly to the basics of phonetics and the last eleven chapters primarily covering issues in phonology. Within each of these, chapters are grouped by topic. I assigned the first nine chapters as required reading for an upper-level undergraduate course in phonetics that I taught. The writing style is at times nearly conversational, with applicable analogies that encourage the reader to bootstrap off of more familiar ideas to get to a trickier concept, and to see it from more than one perspective. At other times it becomes highly technical, and this is one of the difficulties my students had with the text. Additionally, the author seems to make some assumptions about the reader's background that are not always useful or accurate, for example, familiarity with concepts in unrelated fields, such as anatomy and physiology, or physics.
The figures and illustrations are informative and present some of the more technical issues in a way that makes them easier to grasp. Each chapter also contains a bulleted summary of key concepts, complete references to works mentioned in the chapter and suggestions for more in-depth reading, as well as review exercises. I found some of the exercises useful for practicing skills and concepts from the chapter, though many exercises were of the ‘Did you read the book?’ variety.
Chapters 1, 2, and 5 deal with the vocal tract, place and manner of articulation, and gestural timing, including the obligatory introduction to the IPA in Chapter 2. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the articulation (and to some extent the phonological patterning) of consonants and vowels, respectively, in greater depth. Some language-specific findings that, in my opinion, may be more relevant to phonology or typology, are introduced in these chapters, meant to flesh out the discussion of kinds of vowels and consonants, but my introductory students did not know what to do with this information, and were waylaid by what felt like too much novel information, without the background to be able to categorize it. The organization within each chapter was my students’ primary difficulty with the text. Students were unclear about what was relevant information that they needed to know, and what was supporting information that they were not expected to memorize.
Chapter 6 provides a background in physics suitable for understanding the following chapters on acoustic analysis. Chapters 7 and 8 introduce the tools of acoustic analysis, including waveforms, spectra, and spectrograms, with some helpful generalizations about reading spectrograms in Chapter 7, which one traditionally acquires after repeated experience analyzing spectrograms. There are many formulae and calculations in Chapter 8, which are useful for some students’ understanding of how signal analysis works. Other students, however, found it daunting and overly technical, without understanding how the math ‘explains’ how we can ‘look’ at speech sounds using tools such as waveforms and spectrograms. Chapter 9 briefly explains how the signal is filtered and processed by listeners, which is a good segue into the phonology section, as it introduces units of perception and brings the discussion full circle back to classification of distinct sounds.
Chapter 10 gives an overview of ‘What is phonology?’, with the basics of abstraction and contrastiveness. Chapter 11 goes more in-depth with phonotactics and alternations. The next three chapters explore different phonological modeling frameworks, with summaries of their strengths and weaknesses in handling different aspects of phonological problems. Chapter 12 explains how structuralist models use distinctive features to describe contrasts, while Chapter 13 explores underlying and surface representations as the input and output of the application of rules according to traditional generative phonology. Chapter 14 describes and gives examples of optimality theory and constraint-based modeling.
Chapters 15–17 cover suprasegmental phonology from a generally constraint-based perspective. Chapter 15 gives a partial treatment of prosodic hierarchy, covering syllable structure, prosodic word, and prosodic phrase. Chapter 16 describes the metrical foot and other stress-based phenomena. Chapter 18 talks about tone and intonation, and their interaction on the intonational phrase level.
Chapters 18–20 cover some topics where application of phonological analysis is appropriate, but these chapters could easily appear in a general introductory linguistics course. Chapter 18 is a brief introduction to language change, especially in English. Chapter 19 touches on some sources of sociolinguistic variation and application of variable constraints, and Chapter 20 introduces some insights from primary and secondary language acquisition.
In her note to instructors, the author suggests that an overview of both phonetics and phonology could be given by assigning only the first chapter of each section. While I did not have this option, I feel this would have been a good use of this textbook. The in-depth chapters are more suitable for individual phonetics or phonology courses with more attention given to the details of each, though I would recommend instructors assign a reading guide to help students through the major concepts in the text and not get bogged down with the copious examples. The book does provide a thorough introduction to both phonetics and phonology, and is appropriate for the target audience.
