Introduction

Although language can be written or produced mechanically (through gestures), speech remains by far the most common way in which humans communicate.

Definition: Phonetics

Phonetics is the branch of linguistics which studies the sounds used by humans when communicating.

Humans are capable of producing a large, albeit finite, variety of speech sounds.

Definition: Phone (Speech Sound)

A phone or speech sound is any individual speech sound which humans can produce.

The limits of what sounds humans can produce are set by our physiology, i.e. the way our vocal chords, mouth, tongue, teeth, lips, etc. function. Luckily, the set of all possible phones is universal - anyone with a normal anatomy can learn to pronounce each and every one of these sounds. In practice, however, only a portion of these possible sounds are observed in actual human languages.

There are two approaches to phonetics.

Definition: Articulatory Phonetics

Articulatory phonetics studies phones by analyzing how they are produced physiologically.

Definition: Acoustic Phonetics

Acoustic phonetics studies phones by recording and analyzing the waveforms of the sounds as they are produced.

Phonetic Transcription

Different languages usually have different ways for representing phones with written symbols. However, phonetics itself is a field which studies speech sounds independently of the languages they occur in. This is why it is particularly useful to have a language-independent system for representing phones in writing.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

The most successful and widely used system for representing phones in writing is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Each distinct phone is represented by exactly one symbol and these symbols are written between square brackets [].