Fundamentos de fonología y fonética española para hablantes de inglés: Manual práctico de español como lengua extranjera by Eva Núñez Méndez (review)

In a market saturated with introductory Spanish phonetics and phonology texts that ignore the language background of the reader, Núñez Méndez’s book responds to a need for pedagogical resources designed with the native English speaker in mind. The nine-chapter volume has two stated goals: to assist advanced-level anglophone learners of Spanish in their pronunciation of the sounds that typify the language across its regional varieties, and to give readers a clear understanding of the articulatory characteristics of these sounds so that they may be faithfully reproduced.

The first three chapters provide a general orientation to human language and the field of linguistics and its subdisciplines. The introductory chapter lays out the primary objectives of linguistics and offers an overview of the subdisciplines and methodological orientations within the field. Chapter 2 defines Language ( lenguaje) and gives a snapshot of the world’s language families. The third chapter begins with a chronological account of the emergence of historical, descriptive, and generative linguistics as fields of inquiry. Neurolinguistics, language processing and speech production are also given brief mention in the third chapter.

The portion of the book dedicated to the sounds of Spanish commences with chapter 4, which surveys the orthography and phoneme-grapheme correspondences of the language before moving on to stress assignment, permissible syllable structures, treatment of vocalic sequences, resyllabification rules, and intonation patterns of various sentence types in Spanish. A definition of phonology and an explanation of the contrastive function and distributive properties of Spanish phonemes form the basis of the fifth chapter. Chapter 6 provides an overview of human articulatory anatomy, a classification of consonants by manner and place of articulation, the fundamental characteristics of Spanish vocoids, and a discussion of allophonic variation and nasal assimilation processes in Spanish.

Students of language variation will likely find chapters 7 and 8 to be most valuable. The seventh chapter considers regional variation and its primary manifestations in Spanish, differentiating the stereotypically Castilian realizations of the palatal lateral and voiceless interdental fricative with their phonemic counterparts in Andalusian and American varieties of the language. Within this context of variation, Núñez Méndez describes a number of phonological processes, and it is here she introduces the conventions of phonetic transcription. Chapter 8 lays out the main principles of Spanish dialectology, social and contextual approaches to variation, regional linguistic norms, and language contact. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Spanish in the United States, focusing on lexical loans, calques, slang and code-switching.

The ninth chapter is an applied section that takes an itemized approach to explaining how the Spanish phonemes most problematic for anglophones, such as the unaspirated voiceless plosives, the voiceless velar fricative, and the bipartite system of rhotics, differ in articulation from their approximate equivalents in English. The chapter also compares syllabic rhythm and intonation patterns between the languages, with the intention of facilitating the acquisition of these suprasegmental features by native English speakers.

Accompanying the six-page glossary of key terms and three pages of bibliography offered at the conclusion of the manual is an appendix that will prove valuable to advanced-level students with an interest in broadening the scope of their study of Spanish phonetics and phonology beyond the text. The section offers a table of the allophonic variants of the Spanish vocalic inventory, a chart of the Spanish phonemic inventory organized by manner and place of articulation, and a detailed comparison of the phonetic symbols used to represent the sounds of Spanish according to both the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Revista de Filología Española (RFE).

What sets Núñez Méndez’s book apart as a unique and important resource for English-speaking students of Spanish phonetics and phonology, in addition to the...