ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE IPA Basa´ a Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso University of Yaound´ eI makasso2@gmail.com Seunghun J. Lee Central Connecticut State University juliolee@gmail.com Basa / a [ɓàsǎː] is spoken by 282,000 people in the forest area located in the South, Centre and Littoral regions of Cameroon (based on 1982 Ethnologue record; Lewis 2009). Basa / a is a narrow Bantu language in the Niger-Congo language family, and it is classiﬁed as A43 (Guthrie 1967–71, A43a in Maho 2009). The ISO code of Basa / a is bas (Lewis 2009). Early records of the Basa / a language appear at the beginning of the 20th century (Rosenhuber 1908, Sch¨ urle 1912, Scholaster 1914). Recent studies on Basa / a phonology include topics such as vowel raising (Schmidt 1996, Mutaka & Bitjaa Kody 2000), characteristics of consonants (Schmidt 1994, Buckley 1997, Sol / e 2009: 224) and tone (Bˆ ot Ba Njock 1964, Teil-Dautrey 1992, Makasso 2012). For a comprehensive overview of Basa / a phonology, see Bˆ ot Ba Njock (1962) and Hyman (2003). The Basa / a language has also contributed to studies of historical phonology (Janssens 1982, 1986; Teil- Dautrey 1991). Other literature on Basa / a includes dictionaries (Sch¨ urle 1912, Lemb & de Gastines 1973) as well as morphological studies (Bˆ ot Ba Njock 1970, Voorhoeve 1980, Dimmendaal 1988, Bitjaa Kody 1990, Hyman 2000). However, a phonetic description of Basa / a represents a gap in this literature, which this Illustration aims to ﬁll. Examples in this paper come from two sources: Hyman (2003), and the ﬁrst author, who is a native speaker of the Basa / a language. The accompanying recordings for this article are of a male Basa / a native speaker in his thirties, recorded on a Marantz PMD661 Field Recorder using a head-worn microphone (Shure WH-30 XLR). Consonants The phonetic chart of Basa / a consonants shows that the voiceless plosives do not have voiced counterparts, except for the labialized velar. Among the voiceless fricatives, all but /s/ and Journal of the International Phonetic Association (2015) 45/1 C  International Phonetic Association doi:10.1017/S0025100314000383