Varieties of English and German are not generally associated with non-pulmonic sound production. Unlike languages that have non-pulmonic sounds as part of their regular phonological inventories, clicks, ejectives and percussives in English or German have received little systematic attention. Thus, for instance, in Catford's (Reference Catford1977) seminal introduction to phonetics, English ejectives get only passing mention:
In English they occasionally occur as the realization of final [p, t, k] in pathological speech, and in some northern English dialects. (Catford Reference Catford1977: 70)
However, in recent years, systematic descriptions of the forms and functions of non-pulmonic sounds, especially in English and German, have slowly been growing (e.g. Fuchs, Koenig & Winkler Reference Fuchs, Koenig and Winkler2007; Simpson Reference Simpson2007, in press; Wright Reference Wright2007, Reference Wright2011a, Reference Wrightb; Ogden Reference Ogden2009). Possibly one of the most interesting recent developments is the apparent increase in the prevalence of ejectives in a number of varieties of English (Simpson, in press). This themed issue of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association represents a contribution to the growing body of research in this area by bringing together five papers which use a range of different observational and instrumental techniques to examine form, function and distribution of sounds produced with glottalic and lingual airstream mechanisms in English and German. The papers by Gordeeva & Scobbie and McCarthy & Stuart-Smith look at different aspects of ejectives in Scottish English. While Gordeeva & Scobbie examine intriguing questions of the complex glottal mechanisms at work, McCarthy & Stuart-Smith address sociophonetic distributional issues. The remaining three studies concentrate on sound production using a lingual airstream mechanism. Fuchs & Rodgers look at intraoral air pressure changes in a variety of different consonant sequences in German, continuing a line of work begun in Marchal (Reference Marchal1987) with an examination of intraoral pressure changes in French consonant sequences. Different aspects of the intricate interactional work carried out by clicks and percussives in English are described in detail in the paper by Ogden. Finally, the study by Gold, French & Harrison analyses data from the DyViS corpus (Nolan et al. Reference Nolan, McDougall, de Jong and Hudson2009) to show how the shape and occurrence of clicks might be exploited in a forensic phonetic context.
