When conducting fieldwork on tone languages, the linguist choosing to use the IPA to make phonetic transcriptions of tone is presented with a challenge: Current methods of tone transcription in the IPA require a degree of phonological analysis before they can be applied and when applied they do not adequately display pitch distinctions relative to other pitches. I describe this challenge and the bar method as a proposed solution. The bar method visually presents F0 distinctions relative to other F0 expressions without ties to segments. I hope this solution facilitates the discussion of phonetic tone transcription without regard to phonological assumptions, linguistic tradition, or geographical area of research.

Successful writing systems today depend on electronic input methods which can be easily used for producing printed or electronic material. This paper explores keyboard design issues involved in designing two keyboards for two different established orthographies. Both orthographies are based on Latin scripts and cover a total of five minority languages in Mexico (four languages in the Meꞌphaa genus and Sochiapam Chinantec [cso] ). The design issues consider:

1. Technical differences encountered across major computer operating systems (OS X and Windows)

2. Computer culture issues like the keyboard layout of the national language

3. Key stroke frequency of language specific segments

4. Unicode/non-Unicode issues related to character composition

Designing a Unicode keyboard for data input allowed native speakers of Meꞌphaa to have a greater involvement in the data collected by feeding the documentation team typed data and texts in addition to providing oral data. Early adaption of digital input methods may prove to better meet the needs of both language community and researcher. By giving the language community a keyboard for their orthography the minority language speakers were given the opportunity to enter into, and use, new technological domains with their language.

The (inter)dental approximant is a little-studied speech sound in the Philippines and Western Australia. In this paper, we document the articulation of the sound, providing acoustic and video data from Kagayanen and Limos Kalinga, respectively. The sound is attested in at least fifteen languages. It is contrastive in five Western Australian languages, while in the Philippines it generally patterns as an allophone of /l/ but has emerged recently as a separate phoneme due to contact. It arose independently in the two regions. The sound is easily describable in terms of values of phonological features or phonetic parameters. All of these factors argue for the inclusion of the sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet.