Phonetics Resources by Subtopic!

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What is phonetics?

Phonetics, in summary, is a study of the base speech sounds in a language. What makes it different from phonology is that this field looks into how these sounds are conceptualized by themselves (that is to say, sounds that are abstracted from the environment of surrounding speech sounds. Phonology, on the other hand, centers around the interaction of sounds with each other in a particular language's structure system.

There are three main subfields within phonetics as a research field: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics. Also crucial to understanding phonetics is the International Phonetic Alphabet and transcription conventions. Soon to come is an explanation of each of these fields!

Transcription

Phonetic transcription utilizes the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to denote pronunciation in a manner that is universally understood. Each sound has a corresponding letter in the IPA. It gives linguists a standard upon which they can analyze speech sounds and write them out, simply put. It is particularly important for languages that have multiple sounds represented by a single letter (for example: the American English "a" has different pronunciations based on the word. The "a" in the word "apple" (represented by the phoneme [æ]) is pronounced differently than the "a" sound in "vacation" (represented by the phoneme [e]). The creation of these phonemes allows for a universal understanding of pronunciation from a linguistics perspective.

Below you can see the most well-known version of the IPA chart.

This chart not only allows the pronunciation of certain words to be rendered explicit, but it allows linguists to better explain certain differences between dialects, registers, etc. between individuals and groups. The IPA is essential to know, and using it to transcribe words comes with lots of practice and memorization.

Diacritics

Oftentimes in phonetics and phonology, linguists will need to provide the most detail possible when analyzing speech segments. For this, diacritics come into play. They can denote stress, nasalization, aspiration, palatalization, and more variants in speech that would be unnacounted for if only phonemes were just used. These diacritics, when combined with attention to positional variants and other phonological rules, are what separate broad transcription from narrow transcription. The complete list of diacritics can be seen at the bottom of the IPA chart above.

Examples of transcription (in American English)

Broad transcription:

• "Phonetics": [fənɛtɪks]
• "English": [ɪŋlɪʃ]
• "Palatal": [pælətəl]