This popular and accessible introduction to phonetics is now available in a fully updated second edition. Peter Ladefoged describes how languages use a variety of different sounds, many of them quite unlike any that occur in well-known languages.

Important topics covered in Vowels and Consonants include:

• The main forces operating on the sounds of languages
  
• The acoustic components of speech and speech synthesis
  
• Computers and Text-To-Speech systems and speech recognition systems
  
• Descriptions of the sounds of a wide variety of languages that are reproduced on the accompanying CD.

This revised edition includes a new chapter on how we listen to speech and the greatly expanded CD now contains data on 100 languages to reinforce learning and bring the descriptions to life.