McLeod et al. (2017) (open access) have an excellent tutorial for speech pathologists needing to assess speech production (e.g., speech articulation) in a language they do not speak.

The tutorial is open access, easy to read, appropriately detailed, and (in my view) theoretically reasonable. The authors discuss practical, as well as cultural and linguistic considerations. So I’m not going to say much more here - go and read their tutorial!

Other resources

Some other resources that I find helpful in working with speech production across different languages:

  • Multilingual Children’s Speech by McLeod (2024a) has many helpful resources, including:
  • Seeing Speech by Lawson, Stuart-Smith, et al. (2018) has a collection of MRI and ultrasound videos of articulation of speech sounds found in many different languages
    • STAR by Lawson, Cleland, et al. (2018) has MRI and ultrasound videos of a wide variety of speech characteristics that are often seen in children’s speech production disorders
  • PHOIBLE by Moran & McCloy (2019) is a database of segmental phonological inventories (i.e., lists of phonemes) from over 2000 languages, provided in IPA notation
  • PhonBank by MacWhinney & Rose (2018) is a database of corpora (collections of recordings and/or transcriptions) of speech samples collected for studies of speech acquisition. At present (January 2025), it contains corpora of typical speech development from around 20 languages, as well as some corpora of typical multilingual development, and some clinical populations.
    • Clinicians can create a (free) account to access and use the data for clinical or research purposes, but do need to follow the rules of use (e.g., giving appropriate credit where due, and respecting and treating the data as you would your clinical data)
  • Glottolog by Hammarström et al. (2024) is a comprehensive database of studies of many of the world’s languages. The database currently (as at January 2025) includes more than 400 000 studies of over 8000 languages.
    • To search Glottolog for studies concerning the phonology of a language, first go to ‘Languages’ (top bar) and then under ‘Name’ search for the name of the language. Click on the language, scroll down to the reference list, and then under ‘Doctype’ select ‘phonology’. If you find references that look useful, you can search for these in Google etc

References

Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M., & Bank, S. (2024). Glottolog 5.1. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. https://glottolog.org/
Lawson, E., Cleland, J., & Stuart-Smith, J. (2018). STAR: Speech therapy animation and imaging resource. University of Glasgow. https://seeingspeech.ac.uk
Lawson, E., Stuart-Smith, J., Scobbie, J. M., & Nakai, S. (2018). Seeing speech: An articulatory web resource for the study of phonetics. University of Glasgow. https://seeingspeech.ac.uk
MacWhinney, B., & Rose, Y. (2018). PhonBank: A database for phonological development. https://phonbank.talkbank.org/
McLeod, S. (2024a). Multilingual children’s speech. Charles Sturt University. https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/home
McLeod, S. (2024b). Multilingual speech acquisition studies. Charles Sturt University. https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition/speech-acq-studies
McLeod, S. (2024c). Multilingual speech assessment tools. Charles Sturt University. https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/speech-assessment-tools
McLeod, S., & Blake, H. L. (2024). Multilingual speech interventions. Charles Sturt University. https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-interventions
McLeod, S., Harrison, L. J., & McCormack, J. (2012). Intelligibility in context scale. Charles Sturt University. https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/ics
McLeod, S., Verdon, S., & The International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech. (2017). Tutorial: Speech assessment for multilingual children who do not speak the same language (s) as the speech-language pathologist. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 26(3), 691–708. https://doi.org/10.1044/2017_AJSLP-15-0161
Moran, S., & McCloy, D. (Eds.). (2019). PHOIBLE 2.0. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. https://phoible.org/