Asturian (ISO 639), also known as Bable, Asturiano, Asturianu, Astur-Leonese or Leonese, is the vernacular language of Principality of Asturias, an autonomous community of just over one million inhabitants located in Northern Spain. Asturian is spoken by approximately 100,000 individuals within Asturias plus a few thousand more outside of this region. Historically, Astur-Leonese was spoken in parts of the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora and there are still remnants of it in Castilian Spanish. In addition, a variety of Asturian – called Mirandés – is currently spoken in the Portuguese province of Miranda de Douro, where it is a language co-official with Portuguese (Figure 1).

Although Spanish is a relatively unified language, in the sense that people from very distant locations manage to understand each other well, there are several phonetic phenomena that distinguish geographically separated varieties. The total number of native speakers of Spanish is above 400 million, and roughly 10% of them live in Argentina (Instituto Cervantes 2014). The accent described below corresponds to formal Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, and the main allophones are indicated by parentheses in the Consonant Table. The recordings are from a 49-year-old college-educated male speaker, who has lived all his life in either the city of Buenos Aires or the province of Buenos Aires.

Arthur S. Abramson, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and founding department chair at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Emeritus Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories, and a major figure in the international phonetics community, died on 15 December, 2017 at the age of 92.