Some of My Chief Publications

The first book I wrote was the 424-page unpublished GSE i.e. Glamorgan Spoken English on the types of speech of the county in which I grew up. My very first phonetic publication was a ‘Transcribed Specimen of Cardiff English’ in the mf (i.e. Le Maître Phonétique) in 1964 at pages 6 & 7). This was reprinted as page 104 of a volume of articles entitled English in Wales edited by Nikolas Coupland published in 1990 by Multilingual Matters Ltd. That book also contained two extracts from GSE namely ‘The Roots of Cardiff English’ at pages 105-108, and ‘Syntax and Lexis in Glamorgan English’ at pages 109-120.

In 1969 my first published book as sole author A Guide to English Pronunciation was issued by the Scandinavian Universities Press (pages viii & 170). At its page 35 I introduced as a new term of phonological classification the word ‘compression’. This was described as occurring ‘when a diphthong is reduced to a simple vowel or a vowel reduced to an approximant’ etc. Such a use of the term appeared in John Wells’s masterpiece Accents of English in 1982 and featured prominently in his Longman Pronunciation Dictionary occupying a page and a half of explanation in its 1990 first edition.

My article ‘The American & British Accents of English’ appeared in the journal English Language Teaching in 1971. At its p. 243 I introduced the term ‘Yod Dropping’ which, following upon its adoption in Wells’s Accents of English, became the usual designation for the now often discussed process. An evolved version of that article renamed ‘The General American & General British Pronunciations of English’ appears in this website as Section 3 Item 1.

In 1972 my Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English was published by Oxford University Press (pages xx & 233). This introduced the term ‘General British’ most notably adopted as an important new element of the revised nomenclature of the 2014 eighth edition of Alan Cruttenden’s unrivalled series of re-castings of A. C. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English.

In 1974 there appeared the third edition of Hornby’s Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English with general contributions by the late Anthony Cowie and phonetic ones by myself. One of the reasons why this third edition became a landmark publication was that it was the first ever sizeable dictionary (at 100,000 words) whose phonetic content gave equal attention to American and British pronunciations in a fashion that was quite soon to become universally followed.

In 1977 Oxford University Press brought out my book People Speaking: Phonetic Readings in Current English.(pages iv & 92) presenting analyses of fifty-three varied audio samples of mixed re'd aloud and unscripted conversational British English chiefly as study and practice materials for EFL use.

In 1985 my article ‘British non-dialect accents’ was published in the Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Issue 33/8 at pages 244-57. Wells’s Accents of English page 297 referred to a not then published draft of this paper which it said ‘conveniently summarized the views of a number of writers over the last century’ on the topic of ‘RP’.

In 1995 I was editor of and contributor to thirty-eight Studies in General and English Phonetics in Honour of Professor J. D. O’Connor (pages xxii & 473) published by Routledge.

In 1997 my article ‘The 100 English Words Most Difficult to Pronounce’ appeared at pages 25 to 48 of the Inaugural Edition of English Phonetics, the Journal of the English Phonetic Society of Japan edited by M. Tsuzuki. An extended revision of this article is to be seen in my Homepage as Section 4 Item 7 renamed ‘Weakform Words & Contractions for Advanced EFL Users’.

In 2003 my article ‘IPA vowel symbols for British English in dictionaries’ was published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association Vol. 33 No. 2 at pages 143-152.

In 2014 an article ‘Phonetics in Advanced Learner's Dictionaries’ was also published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association. It appeared in Vol.44 No.1 at pages 75-82.