Gekkotan lizards are the most vocal of all squamates and a majority of species (exclusive of eublepharids and most diurnal geckos) are capable of producing both distress calls and more complex advertisement calls, the latter being typically restricted to males. Although the vocal characteristics of some individual species are known, this study presents the first effort to identify general patterns in vocalization and laryngotracheal morphology across a broad phylogenetic sampling of taxa. We recorded up to 10 parameters of sonographic data for 36 gecko species (25 of which were previously unsampled) in 6 of 7 gekkotan families. Advertisement calls are species and individual specific, and the dominant call frequency is negatively correlated with body size, supporting the interpretation that such calls provide information about identity and condition to conspecifics. Advertisement calls have a much narrower frequency bandwidth than distress calls, which are used to deter predators across a spectrum of auditory ranges. Features of laryngotracheal morphology, especially laryngeal size and tracheal dilation, are associated with acoustic properties of phonation, but do not exhibit a strong phylogenetic signal. Ancestral state reconstructions using parsimony and maximum-likelihood methods indicate that the gekkotan ancestor possessed a ring-shaped cricoid cartilage with distinct lateral processes and circumferentially continuous tracheal rings. With a substantial increase in the number and phylogenetic diversity of species sampled, our data largely confirm the generality of structural and functional patterns of gecko phonation previously inferred from focal studies of select taxa.