This book teaches readers how to conduct phonetic fieldwork, from planning through data collection to analysis. Peter Ladefoged is eminently qualified to write this book, as probably the world's top phonetician, and as someone with an astounding quantity of phonetic fieldwork experience.

The book has eight chapters, beginning with a chapter on everything that comes prior to analyzing data: creating a word list, finding and choosing speakers, taking notes while in the field, equipment, and so on. This chapter includes crucial details such as how much to pay speakers, how to keep them from producing excessively prescriptive speech, and how to get human subjects' permission (even if the speakers have never held a pen and won't be comfortable with written consent). Although only one chapter is devoted to these logistical aspects of fieldwork, this may be the most important part of the book.

Subsequent chapters are divided by type of analysis. There are two chapters on articulatory phonetics: chap. 2 on place of articulation (palatography, with a subsection on photography), and chap. 3 on aerodynamics (oral and nasal airflow, oral pressure, electroglottography, and subglottal pressure). Four chapters on acoustic phonetics follow. Chap. 4 describes measurement of pitch, loudness, and duration; chap. 5, vowel quality; chapter 6, spectral acoustics of consonants; and chap. 7, voice quality. Chap. 8 summarizes equipment needs, briefly mentions some additional non-field methods, and covers more practical details (e.g., remembering anti-malaria medication, holding a party for the community when you finish your work).

The book is written in a very pleasant, informal style. I laughed out loud while reading it. The feeling is of sitting down with a very kind, knowledgeable senior professor, who proceeds to give you advice for the next several hours about how to conduct research, while you scribble notes down madly. A pleasant feature is the anecdote boxes, which contain personal stories from Ladefoged's fieldwork experiences. These are even more amusing reading than the main text, and one tends to skip ahead to read them all. Most of these anecdotes contain good advice about conducting fieldwork, whether it is phrased as advice or not. The anecdotes themselves constitute a tutorial on cultural sensitivity in fieldwork. The anecdotal character of the writing spills over into the main text, but this is fine: Ladefoged has a tremendous amount of knowledge to impart about how to do phonetic fieldwork, and some of it is best transmitted through examples from his own experiences.

There is a great deal to say in favor of this book. It is extremely thorough, and it provides a great deal of detail about almost every step in the fieldwork process, from how to find subjects and construct a word list to how to work with the subjects, how to record, how to make most types of measurements, and what to do after the field trip. The downside of this thoroughness is that the information is probably excessive for most readers. Even phoneticians may never choose to do palatography or electroglottography in the field, and very few of us will ever measure subglottal air pressure even in the lab. For those who are not primarily phoneticians but do work with insufficiently documented languages, this much detail about so many methods may be overwhelming. Furthermore, for many articulatory methods, it may not be advisable to attempt them based on written instructions alone, no matter how good those instructions are. Some of these methods are best learned in person from an expert.

However, this is not necessarily a negative aspect about the book: The information is there for those who want it, and if readers focus on the techniques they might use, the other chapters need not be overwhelming. If one finds oneself working on a language with breathy or creaky voice, one could read the voice quality chapter, and if one used a good flat response microphone (chap. 1), one could measure voice quality without further instruction. For researchers whose primary interest is in discourse, language in use, sociolinguistics, and related fields, the most useful chapters might be 1, 4, 5, 6, and 8. This book could be especially useful to those not originally planning phonetic fieldwork, because following the equipment and recording recommendations would mean that acoustic phonetic analysis would still be possible afterward.

The methodological information is important for both fieldwork and lab work. For example, Ladefoged repeatedly emphasizes that one should first look over a reasonable sample of the tokens by eye before beginning measurements, so that one can choose good criteria for how to make the measurements (e.g., What counts as the onset of voicing? What counts as a pitch peak?). One must then stick to these criteria for every item, even if they do not appear accurate for some items. One should take copious notes while making measurements so that one can go back and change the criteria easily if necessary, but one should look at enough items before beginning to avoid this. This is the basis of phonetic measurement, and it is something one often struggles to teach students. Another example is how to avoid counting a spurious pitch tracker error as a linguistically meaningful pitch peak, which is easy to do when one first looks at pitch data.

I value the strong respect for one's consultants and their culture that Ladefoged conveys. He reminds the reader that naive speakers with little formal education may grasp exactly what the linguist is doing and be very astute at finding patterns in their language. He also makes suggestions about broadening one's views in order to form a good relationship with the community. Another ethical issue, the effect of fieldwork on endangered languages, is tangentially addressed.

A potential negative point is the book's emphasis on careful speech, primarily single words in a frame sentence. For basic phonetic description of an undocumented language, this unnatural speech style is probably ideal, but the field of phonetics has recently been moving toward more natural speech. Ladefoged recommends not recording more than a few sentences of connected speech. Anyone studying language above the level of phonetics and phonology will be recording connected speech anyway, but even for purely phonetic investigations, it might be useful to record casual connected speech as well. While telling traditional stories might distract speakers for a while, if one can get a good transcription, this would allow study of intonation and fast speech reduction. (Also, if the language becomes extinct and community members later wish to revitalize it, they will be grateful for connected speech recordings.)

A few topics are omitted from the book, such as statistical analysis and thorough information about experimental design. Of course, statistics is a large topic and cannot be covered within this book. However, more on experimental design would be useful. This could help to prevent returning from the field and consulting a statistics expert only to find that one does not have the right data, or enough data in each condition, to test the main hypothesis. Another thing left out (intentionally) is theory. The book is about methodology and does not purport to discuss theory. This is fine, but readers need to have enough background to understand why one would be doing the research described in the book. Finally, speech perception is omitted. Although perception research is less common in the field than acoustic research, field perception research is possible, and some suggestions on how to do basic perceptual research would be useful.

To sum up, this is an extremely useful book for anyone who plans to record speech under any circumstances. It is most useful for those doing phonetic studies on little-documented languages in the field. However, it would also be very useful to non-phonetician field researchers who might want to check out the stress vs. tone system of their particular field language, or some funny-sounding consonants that might be implosives, or whether and how far nasalization spreads, or anything else about sounds that one might notice while doing fieldwork. The book would even be quite useful to fieldworkers who don't do any phonetics, for the chapters on equipment and logistics. Furthermore, this is an excellent resource for anyone using a particular phonetic method, even in the lab. If a student needs to measure voice quality, even if it is voice quality of Standard American English recorded in the lab, that student should absolutely read the voice quality chapter. This is not only the case for students: This book could serve as a standard manual for making phonetic measurements. I am considering using it as one textbook for my introductory graduate phonetics course, because it covers so much methodology most textbooks don't. To conclude, all researchers who record speech should have a copy of this book, even though not everyone needs to read every chapter.