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Annual Review of Linguistics

Volume 11, 2025

Phonetic Universals

  • Eleanor Chodroff1
  • Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 11:251-273 (Volume publication date February 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on October 30, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Understanding the range and limits of crosslinguistic variation stands at the core of linguistic typology and, more broadly, the scientific inquiry of human language. Linguistic typology is concerned with the relevant dimensions along which languages can vary and those along which they remain stable; an overarching goal is to understand the cognitive, physical, social, and historical factors that shape language. Phonetics is no exception to this enterprise, but it has faced obstacles in crosslinguistic data collection and processing power. The field has nevertheless established a solid foundation regarding the relevant dimensions of stability, revealing strong phonetic tendencies across languages (i.e., universals). This article provides an overview of phonetic universals with a summary of previously attested descriptive and analytic phonetic universals and consideration of methodological aspects when investigating phonetic universals. The increasing availability of multilingual speech data along with advanced speech processing tools promises a new era for investigations into crosslinguistic phonetic variation and systematicity.

Keyword(s): acoustic phonetics, articulatory ease, dispersion, phonetic universals, phonetics–phonology interface, uniformity
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Phonetic Universals
Annual Review of Linguistics 11, 251 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011724-121511
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