This book presents Jørgen Rischel's most important work on linguistic sound structure, its relation to other aspects of language, and its variation across the world's languages. This includes some of the most original and groundbreaking research of the last four decades.

Jørgen Rischel, who died in May 2007, was-at the time of his death-Professor of Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. He was known internationally for his descriptive work on Greenlandic, his grammar of Minor Mlabri of Thailand, and his analyses of Danish phonology and morphology. He also wrote extensively on historical linguistics, the history of linguistics, linguistic fieldwork, phonology, and the links between linguistics and culture. Nina Grønnum is senior lecturer in phonetics at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. The bulk of her research work is within Danish phonetics and phonology, particularly Danish intonation and Danish stød. She is responsible for the recently completed spontaneous speech corpus, DanPASS (Danish Phonetically Annotated Spontaneous Speech). Frans Gregersen is the director of the Danish National Research Foundation LANCHART Centre focusing on language change in real time. He has worked on the sociolinguistics of Danish for thirty years and will continue to do so. He has also written on the history of linguistics and literacy. Hans Basbøll is Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics at the Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark. He has worked extensively on the phonology and morphology of Danish, and on general phonology (in particular syllable structure and prosody). He has directed projects on Danish child language. His main publication is The Phonology of Danish (Oxford University Press 2005).