Revising the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a pressing task which should find its natural forum for debate in this Journal, above all others. Elsewhere (Ladefoged (1987); and in our own pages, Ladefoged and Roach (1987)) the President and Secretary of the International Phonetic Association issue a call to arms for this task, drawing attention to some preliminary questions on which the Association needs to have a clear view. One question is that of the IPA's constituency: who are the users of the IPA, and what are their different needs for a phonetic alphabet? To help find out, the Association hopes to canvas as wide a population of IPA users as possible, drawing from non-members as well as members.

The International Phonetic Association is not usually considered as a group of theoreticians. If the members have a self-image, they probably consider themselves as practical people, who apply their particular skills to real problems such as pronunciation teaching, speech pathology, the description of spoken languages, and speech recognition. They probably do not think of themselves as part of one of the very few organized groups in the world that promulgates an official theory about its subject matter. But that is precisely what the International Phonetic Association does. It sanctions an official set of symbols for representing the sounds of spoken language. By doing so it prescribes a certain way of describing sounds; the symbols are, after all, just symbols. They are shorthand ways of representing certain information, namely, the choices permitted by the phonetic theory.

For some time now it has been clear that the International Phonetic Alphabet consonant chart needs to be carefully re-examined, with a view to its intended provision and possible revision. This article appears as part of the current drive (see also Ladefoged (1987a)) to solicit suggestions for the improvement or revision of the chart, from all the manifold users of the IPA alphabet. The focus here is on the consonant chart, for while the representation of vowels has always been more problematic, the theoretical issues are of a different order and should be discussed separately.

The president of the International Phonetic Association has called for a discussion of issues concerning the revision of the International Phonetic Alphabet (Ladefoged (1987 a; b)). This discussion needs to be concerned with the actual use to which the IPA is put by its ‘consumers’ as well as with the way that the design of the Alphabet reflects and interacts with the notion of a phonetic theory. However, for many phoneticians perhaps the first issue to come to mind will be the need for possible additions to the Alphabet to represent sounds that at present have no recognized transcription. The present paper discusses suggestions for the transcription of one class of such sounds, namely, linguo-labials. A number of proposals are evaluated in the light of their advantages and drawbacks and the implications they have for principles of transcription and phonetic theory.

The IPA alphabet is, first and foremost, a device for use in the making of impressionistic records of spoken language events. There is no alternative device in widespread use. It is neither full nor systematic as a device for this purpose, but can be used remarkably effectively if supplemented with ad hoc extensions and adaptations. Such adaptations need to be explicit if used in published material, but they need not be standard. They do need, though, to be sensible. Although the IPA letter-shapes are not systematic, the articulatory classification that underlies them is. Within this classification it would be perverse to relate a ‘linguo-labial’ to, say, the category ‘velar’, and so a representation based on the letter-shape ‘k’ would be undesirable. Given these limits, though, I can see no theoretical reason why ‘linguo-labials’ should not be written in a number of ways. [P‥] etc. is one way. It is not a particularily good one, in my view, as [‥] is a diacritic that distinguishes a PASSIVE articulator, and this passive articulator is nowhere involved in ‘linguo-labials’. But I would happily accept [P‥]. It would be desirable for a degree of uniformity to apply in PUBLISHED material, but this is a matter more for editors and for publishers than for front-line linguists. At the PHONETIC level, I can't see that it matters whether we use [P‥] or, say, [‡] in published material: and other suggestions will no doubt be forthcoming, PRACTICAL considerations are paramount here, some solutions being easier to print, type and read than others.

It may be useful to separate out the issue of a choice of symbol from the issue of its status (official approval or individual usage). On the choice of symbol, if we endorse the apparent bias towards articulation as a defining criterion in the IPA then criteria like diachrony, perceptual similarity and even phonology are secondary at best. (Note that in making this inference from current practice, I do not wish to pre-empt any debate about whether the articulatory bias is valid!)

In the summer of 1989 the International Phonetic Association will convene a conference, probably in Northern Europe, which we hope will be one of the most significant meetings in our field for many years. At this meeting we will determine a new version of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which will then become the authorized version of the IPA. The present set of IPA symbols had its origins nearly 100 years ago, shortly after the Association was founded. The present Alphabet is sadly out of date, both from the point of view of the principles underlying it, and with respect to the individual symbols and diacritics. There is no doubt that it should now be revised.

From Winter 1987 JIPA will incorporate, in the second edition of each year, a section devoted to Educational Phonetics. Contributions, in the form of articles, notes, statements of problems, and correspondence, are therefore invited from colleagues whose professional activity lies within this broad area: that is to say, language teachers, speech therapists, clinical audiologists, language pathologists and teachers of acting and singing.

This research began out of two overlapping motives. First, we have been observing what have impressionistically been termed ‘whistling’ fricatives in Shona (and also, though not reported here, in another language, Jibbali); we felt that there was room for a fuller analysis of some aspects of their production characteristics. Second, sibilance in general offers plenty of scope for what Delattre called the ‘quest of the Holy Grail’ in phonetics: the search for features of relevance to perception. More background to both the production and the perception issues will be given as we proceed.