The segmental characteristics of the English spoken in Singapore are quite widely described (e.g. Tongue 1979, Platt and Weber 1980, Brown 1988a, Brown 1991). However, the suprasegmental aspects, such as intonation, are less well documented, even though it is widely accepted that it is the suprasegmental aspects that contribute most to the distinctive character of “foreign” accents such as that of Singapore (Brown 1991: 4).

Christoph Friedrich Hellwag was probably the first scholar who tried to show the auditory relationships and the relative distances of the vowels (Hellwag [1791] 1991). He described the vowels in a space in which the vowels formed a triangle (He didn't actually use the word ‘triangle,’ but spoke instead about a ‘scale,’ ‘ladder,’ ‘stairs,’ or ‘symmetric scheme’ (Monin 1991: 22)). The cardinal vowel system, created by Daniel Jones, has been a valuable frame work for vowel quality description, but it is partly articulatory, partly auditory.

The style of speech illustrated is that of Educated Colloquial Hungarian of the 1990's as spoken in Budapest. Historically, Standard Hungarian is based on the Eastern dialect, which became a supra-dialectal high prestige variety during the 18th century. The speech on the recording is that of a male speaker in his fifties with an academic background, using a somewhat advanced style of speech as spoken in a formal communicative situation.

At the 1989 Kiel Convention of the IPA a sub-group was established to draw up recommendations for the transcription of disordered speech. The report produced at the Convention appeared in print in Duckworth, Hardcastle, Allen and Ball (1990), being mainly a list of symbols, termed ‘extensions to the IPA’, or ‘extIPA’ for short. Examples of the use of the extIPA symbols are given in Ball (1991), Howard (1993) and Ball, Code, Rahilly and Hazlett (1994) among others, and Ball (1993) includes them at textbook level. Various changes and additions to the original set of symbols are reported in Bernhardt and Ball (1993). These changes mean, however, there is a need for a listing of the current set of symbols, preferably in as concise a form as possible. There was also felt to be a need for the symbol set to receive overt recognition from a relevant society, therefore this publication marks the official adoption of the extIPA symbols by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA).