Gimson's Pronunciation of English (review)

This work has been the standard reference book for English phonetics since its first edition was published in 1962. Since then, it has been revised and updated five times. The previous edition is from 1994. In the latest edition, sections on the syllable, phonotactics, and word stress have been rewritten. Also, the sections on the current state of Received Pronunciation (RP) and the varieties of English have been revised. For foreign learners there is a new section on pronouncing dictionaries, and the section on acoustic information now has new spectrograms and formant frequency charts.

The book is divided into three parts: speech and language, the sounds of English, and words and connected speech (including intonation). The latter two parts concentrate on English whereas the first part provides basic phonetic information applicable to all languages (e.g. the production of speech, vocal organs, description and classification of speech sounds, and the basic concepts of phonology and acoustic phonetics).

The model accent of the book is RP, which might raise some objections nowadays, but the book responds to this potential criticism by including a section on the current changes within RP, covering almost complete and well-established changes, as well as some recent innovations. Throughout the book, a modern version of RP is described. In addition, sound descriptions of other accents are also often discussed, and references to, for example, General American variants are not infrequent.

A large part of the book deals with the segmental sounds of English (especially Part 2). Vowels and consonants are introduced with spelling possibilities (and their frequencies), an articulatory description, chief variants, and historical sources, as well as practical pronunciation advice for foreign learners of English.

In sound descriptions, several variants are dealt with, and each phoneme is introduced with examples. The reader should, however, be careful with the consonant examples as some unfortunate errors slipped in when the examples were revised. In this edition, the spelling alternatives of the consonant phonemes receive greater emphasis (but their frequencies have not been included as in the vowel section).

In addition to the actual sounds of modern English, the book also includes a section on the historical development of the sounds of English and the development of phonetics in Britain. There is also a good section on teaching English pronunciation.

This work continues to be absolutely essential for anyone (native or nonnative speaker of English) interested in the phonetics of English. It is a valuable source book for the basics of pronunciation for practical and theoretical purposes and can be useful for phoneticians, linguists, speech and language therapists, and students of English philology.