A beginner’s guide to Phonetics and Phonology
Hello, again! It’s been a few months since my last introduction to Linguistics blog, because I’ve been focusing on moving back to the UK and starting work on my final year of my Linguistics degree, but now I’m back with a beginner’s guide to Phonetics and Phonology. I used to find this part of Linguistics really hard, but over the course of my degree, I’ve fallen in love with it — and I hope you’ll see why.
What is phonetics?
Phonetics examines how we produce and perceive sounds. There are lots of key terms in Phonetics, and different linguists might use them a bit differently. Two of the most important terms are phoneme and allophone. A phoneme is a bit like a category of sound, whereas an allophone is the real production of that sound. If someone comes up to you and asks for some butter, they might say it like “buh-uh”. Or they might say it like “buh tuh”, but say the [t] with lots of breathiness after the [t]. Or they might just say it like “buh tuh”. These specific productions of the /t/ sound are all allophones of the broader phoneme /t/. You can hear all the little differences in sound, but whatever someone says, in your mind you still know that they are referring to this phonemic category /t/. Clever, right?
You probably know that we have both vowels and consonants in our sound systems. And that’s true! Let’s start with consonants. Consonants are categorised by three characteristics: manner of articulation, place of articulation, and voicing. Place of articulation means where you produce the sound. For example, if you say a [f] sound, you produce it by having your upper teeth on your bottom lip — which, in Phonetics, we call labiodental. Some other places of articulation include:
Bilabial = sounds made with contact between both lips (such as [p] or [b])
Dental = sounds made with the tongue between the teeth (such as [th])
Alveolar = sounds made with the tip of the tongue touching the part (called the alveolar ridge) a little behind your teeth (such as [t] or [d])
Glottal = sounds made in the glottis — which feels just like it’s just below the back of the throat (such as [h])
There are more places of articulation, but let’s leave it at that for the moment. If you are trying to learn more, I’d recommend firstly learning the physiology of the vocal and nasal cavity, and then getting the mirror out and trying to say the sounds again and again, and seeing what happens. You might look a bit weird, but it helps.
Now, manner of articulation means how you produce the sound. A sound like [f] is called a fricative. A fricative is a sound which is produced by pushing air through a small space in your mouth. When you say [f] for an extended period of time, you can feel the air going through the small space. Here’s a couple of other manners of articulation:
Plosives = these are sounds made by making some form of obstacle. When you say [p], for example, both lips initially form an obstacle. Other sounds in this category include [b], [t], [d], [g] and so on.
Nasal = these are sounds made by air passing through the nasal cavity. Try to say [m] or [n] for a long time and then pinch your nose. You can’t, can you?
The other categorisation is a bit less complicated: voicing. [f] is a voiceless sound. That basically means when you say [f], your vocal folds are not vibrating. You can tell by saying [f] and putting your fingers on your throat — you’ll feel nothing. But if you say [v] and do the same, you’ll feel a vibration. That’s because [v] is voiced, and the vocal folds vibrate. Sounds come in pairs, so you can try the same with [s] and [z], [k] and [g], and [t] and [d].
Now, I’m not going to delve into vowels here — I’ll leave the specifics for a later post, so I do it justice. But just briefly, for context, vowels are sounds that don’t really have an obstruction in the vocal cavity when you say them. A simple way to think about vowels is in terms of three things: tongue height, tongue backness, and lip opening. But let’s leave that for next time.
If you want to learn a bit more about Phonetics, take a look at the IPA chart, which will introduce you to some more terminology, and maybe make what I’ve briefly explained a bit clearer. Phoneticians write in IPA — the International Phonetic Alphabet — which is a standardised system where we can record all sounds in languages with the same notation. I’ve not written in IPA here because many readers won’t be familiar yet — but you’ll need a lot of IPA practice if you’re going to work in Phonetics. And it will make life easier in the long-run.
What is phonology?
Phonology is the study of the sound system. Each language has its own sound system that is similar in some ways, and different in some ways, to other languages. One of the first things we learn about our language as a baby is the sound system — we learn which sounds to pay attention to, and which parts of sounds to ignore, because different languages prioritise different things. Babies are kind of like linguistic geniuses!
Phonology can also tell us that some sounds might just not exist in one language — think of the difference between English and Dutch. Dutch has a sound which, to English speakers, sounds a bit throaty (I’m hoping you know the one I mean). We don’t have that sound in our system. We can make the sound (not well, generally), but it’s not a part of our language. Similarly, two sounds in Language A might count as two separate phonemes, whilst the same two sounds in Language B might count as two allophones of the same phoneme. In British English, we don’t use vowel length to distinguish between phonemes, but other languages (e.g., Japanese and Hungarian) do. There’s a lot more to say about phonology, but I’ll leave it here for now.
Why are phonetics and phonology useful for us?
Phonetics and phonology have a wide range of applications in the real world. Phoneticians go onto work in areas such as speech language therapy, the development of AI tools, or linguistic research. Phonology is important too because it helps us to understand the mental representation of language. It also helps us to save endangered languages by understanding their sound systems.
Next time, I’m going to introduce you to my favourite area of phonetics: Sociophonetics. Sociophonetics is all about how we use phonetic variation in our social, political, and cultural world to index different forms of identities or meanings. If you have any thoughts on this in advance, or questions you’d like me to address, drop me a message in the comments. I’d also like to know what you are interested in reading from me, so do drop me a message. Thanks for reading!
(As always, credit to the University of Warwick’s Linguistics Department for developing my knowledge on the subject. Any mistakes are fully my own.)
