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Bio

John Esling is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Victoria, former Secretary of the International Phonetic Association (1995-2003), member of the IPA Council and of the Permanent Council for the Organization of International Congresses of Phonetic Science, former Editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (2003-2011), and former President of the International Phonetic Association (2011-2015). He has an MA in Linguistics from the University of Michigan (1972), where he studied with Ian Catford and Kenneth Pike, and a PhD in Phonetics from the University of Edinburgh (1978), where he worked with David Abercrombie, John Laver, and James (Tony) Anthony. He taught at the University of Leeds before moving to the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, in 1981, where he was Chair of the Department of Linguistics from 2008 to 2013. His research concentrates on auditory and articulatory phonetics, particularly the categorization of voice quality, of vocal register, and of the phonetic production and modelling of laryngeal and pharyngeal sounds. He was the Principal Investigator on two research projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: the Laryngoscopic Phonetic Research Project, to investigate speech articulation in the throat, and the Infant Speech Acquisition (InSpA) Project, an international collaboration based in Victoria with research teams in Canada, France, Morocco and China, to establish how infants first acquire the modality of phonetic speech-sound production. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and chapters and of numerous conference presentations, compiler of the University of Victoria Phonetic Database, section editor for Phonetics of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2006), an editor of the Handbook of the IPA (CUP 1999), an editor of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (CUP 2011), and author of Voice Quality: The Laryngeal Articulator Model (CUP 2019). He collaborated with Prof. Jerry Edmondson and Jimmy G. Harris to produce endoscopic videos to catalogue speech production in the larynx among the languages of the world. He is the ongoing co-developer of an iOS app – iPA Phonetics Pro – illustrating the range of speech sounds and voice qualities in the world’s languages. He is currently part of the CNRS research team in Paris: Phon-udl, Phonetic Approaches to Under-Documented Languages (with a special emphasis on Tibeto-Burman Languages) led by Katia Chirkova.

Selected publications

Esling, John H. (2024). . Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (3rd edn.). Oxford: Elsevier.

Esling, John H. (2024). . Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (3rd edn.). Oxford: Elsevier.

Esling, John H. (2024). . Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (3rd edn.). Oxford: Elsevier.

Esling, John (2023). . In: Speech Sciences Entries. Speech Prosody Studies Group, Campinas, Brazil.

Esling, John, Bernard Harmegnies, Lise Crevier-Buchman & Claire Pillot-Loiseau (2023). Qualité vocale et enseignement de la phonétique comme point de convergence épistémologique. Langages : Revue internationale des sciences du langage, 230, 21-40.

Esling, John H. & Scott R. Moisik (2022). Voice quality. In Rachael-Anne Knight & Jane Setter (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonetics (pp. 237-257). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edmondson, Jerold A., John H. Esling & Li Shaoni (李绍尼). (2021). . Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 51, 490-501. © First View, 27 April 2020.

Moisik, Scott R., Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins & John H. Esling. (2021). . Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 51, 1-35. © First View, 16 April 2019.

Esling, John H. (2017). . In C. Bertini, C. Celata, G. Lenoci, C. Meluzzi & I. Ricci (eds.), Fattori sociali e biologici nella variazione fonetica – Social and biological factors in speech variation (pp. 15-28). Milano: Officinaventuno.

Ball, Martin J., John H. Esling & B. Craig Dickson. (2018). Revisions to the VoQS system for the transcription of voice quality. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 48, 165-171. © First View, 12 April 2017.

Edmondson, Jerold A., John H. Esling & LAMA Ziwo (拉玛兹偓). (2017). . Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 47, 87-97. © First View, 18 March 2016.

Moisik, Scott R., Hua Lin & John H. Esling. (2014). A study of laryngeal gestures in Mandarin citation tones using simultaneous laryngoscopy and laryngeal ultrasound (SLLUS). Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 44, 21-58.

Moisik, Scott R. & John H. Esling (2014). . Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Esling, John H. (2010). Phonetic notation. In William J. Hardcastle, John Laver & Fiona E. Gibbon (Eds.), The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences, 2nd ed. (pp. 678-702). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Moisik, Scott R., Esling, John H., & Crevier-Buchman, Lise. (2010). A high-speed laryngoscopic investigation of aryepiglottic trilling. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127(3), 1548-1559.

Esling, John H. (2005). There are no back vowels: The laryngeal articulator model. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 50, 13-44.

Esling, John H., Fraser, Katherine E., & Harris, Jimmy G. (2005). Glottal stop, glottalized resonants, and pharyngeals: a reinterpretation with evidence from a laryngoscopic study of Nuuchahnulth (Nootka). Journal of Phonetics, 33, 383-410.

Esling, John H. (1999). The IPA categories “pharyngeal” and “epiglottal”: Laryngoscopic observations of pharyngeal articulations and larynx height. Language & Speech, 42, 349-372.

Esling, John H. (1996). Pharyngeal consonants and the aryepiglottic sphincter. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 26, 65-88.

Selected presentations/talks

Principal speaker, Journée en l'honneur de Lise Crevier-Buchman, Hôpital Foch, Suresnes (Paris), 24 May 2024: ‘Le conduit vocal inférieur : source multiple et articulateur complexe’.

Keynote speaker, 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague, August 2023: ‘The larynx as an articulator’.

Invited speaker, Department of Linguistics, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, March 2019: ‘The array of voice qualities in speech: a parade of illustrations’; ‘A new representation of the vocal tract: The Laryngeal Articulator Model’.

Keynote speaker, PoleFon Conference (ПОЛЕФОН-2018: ПОЛЕВАЯ И ЭКСПЕРИМЕНТАЛЬНАЯ ФОНЕТИКА), Институт мировой культуры МГУ, Moscow, Russia, October 19-20, 2018: ‘Laryngeal Articulator Model, Part 1’, ‘Laryngeal Articulator Model, Part 2’.

Invited Keynote (5 seminars), Tomsk State University Annual Symposium, Tomsk, Russia, October 2018: ‘Revised phonetic taxonomy in the iPA Phonetics app’, ‘Linguistic evidence for the Laryngeal Articulator Model’, ‘The pharyngeal origins of human speech’, ‘The array of voice qualities in human speech’, ‘The effect of laryngeal quality on vowel quality’.

Invited speaker, Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, June 2018: Teaching – ‘The five articulators, the iPA Phonetics app, the IPA’, ‘How to do acoustic phonetics without machinery’, ‘The effect of laryngeal quality on vowel quality’, Analysis of samples of speech. Evening Colloquia – ‘A new model of the vocal tract: the Laryngeal Articulator Model’, ‘The array of voice qualities in human speech’.

Guest lecture, Université de Mons-Hainaut, Belgique, Institut de Recherche en Sciences et Technologies du Langage, February 2018: ‘La qualité de la voix : langues, enfants et apprentissage’.

Guest lectures, Department of Theoretical & Applied Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, November 2017: ‘The two-part vocal tract: The laryngeal articulator, voice quality, and vowel quality’, ‘Phonetics: Voice quality and the vocal tract’, ‘Infant Speech Acquisition Project (InSpA): Speech sounds in the first year of life’.

Invited Plenary, AISV 2017 (XIII Convegno Nazionale Associazione Italiana Scienze della Voce), Pisa, Italy, January 2017: ‘The laryngeal articulator’s influence on voice quality and vowel quality’.

Invited Keynote, 1st International Seminar on Voicing in Speech Production and Perception 2016, Articulatory Functioning of the Larynx – A Day with Professor John Esling, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal, May 2016: ‘Voice quality: The laryngeal articulator, infant speech acquisition and speech origins’ and ‘A parade of illustrations of voice quality settings’.

LABEX – Empirical Foundations of Linguistics, invited lecture series, l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, UMR 7018 – Laboratoire de phonétique et phonologie (LPP), October 28 – November 30, 2014: (four archived lectures on Voice Quality): ‘Voice and voice quality and voice quality classification’, ‘Infant acquisition of speech and voice quality’, ‘Phonetic modelling of voice quality and phonological implications’, ‘Linguistic exemplars and voice quality in linguistic theory’.