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 a hundred languages to reinforce learning and bring the descriptions to life.

"Only Peter Ladefoged, the world's leading phonetician, could produce a work like this: an authoritative and thorough introduction to phonetics written in a style that can be understood by a reader with no prior background in linguistics" -- John Ohala, University of California, Berkeley