Phonology - the study of speech sounds

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Introduction What is phonology? Physics and physiology Phonology, phonemes and phonetics IPA symbols The sounds of English Vowels Diphthongs Consonants Syllables Suprasegmentals Accent Received pronunciation Accent and social class Pronunciation and prescription Language acquisition Language change Phonology for exam students Phonetic symbols and electronic documents Different ways of representing sound Conventions of language science Literary models Background reading Download this guide Introduction This guide is written for students who are following GCE Advanced level (AS and A2) syllabuses in English Language. This resource may also be of general interest to language students on university degree courses, trainee teachers and anyone with a general interest in language science. This page uses IPA symbols - you need a Unicode font, such as Lucida Sans Unicode, installed on your computer system to see these display correctly. For example, the red character between these square brackets [ə]should appear as schwa (looks like an eupside down). If the schwa symbols does not appear, you should go to the IPA Unicode site to download a suitable font: Click here to go to the IPA Unicode site You will also not see Unicode fonts in some early browser versions. If you use Microsoft'sInternet Explorer, you need version 5.5 or later; if you use Netscape Communicator, you need version 6.0 or later. Click on the links below to get the latest versions of these browsers. Get Internet Explorer from www.microsoft.com Get Netscape Communicator from home.netscape.com On this page I use red type for emphasis. Brown type is used where italics would appear in print (in this screen font, italic looks like this, and is unkind on most readers). Headings have their own hierarchical logic, too: Main section headings look like this Sub-section headings look like this Minor headings within sub-sections look like this Back to top What is phonology? Phonology is the study of the sound system of languages. It is a huge area of language theory and it is difficult to do more on a general language course than have an outlineknowledge of what it includes. In an exam, you may be asked to comment on a text that you are seeing for the first time in terms of various language descriptions, of which phonology may be one. At one extreme, phonology is concerned with anatomy andphysiology - the organs of speech and how we learn to use them. At another extreme, phonology shades into socio-linguistics as we consider social attitudes to features of sound such as accent and intonation. And part of the subject is concerned with finding objective standard ways of recording speech, and representing this symbolically. For some kinds of study - perhaps a language investigation into the phonological development of young children or regional variations in accent, you will need to use phonetic transcription to be credible. But this is not necessary in all kinds of study - in an exam, you may be concerned with stylistic effects of sound in advertising or literature, such as assonance, rhyme or onomatopoeia - and you do not need to use special phonetic symbols to do this. Back to top The physics and physiology of speech Man is distinguished from the other primates by having the apparatus to make the sounds of speech. Of course most of us learn to speak without ever knowing much about these organs, save in a vague and general sense - so that we know how a cold or sore throat alters our own performance. Language scientists have a very detailed understanding of how the human body produces the sounds of speech. Leaving to one side the vast subject of how we choose particular utterances and identify the sounds we need, we can think rather simply of how we use our lungs to breathe out air, produce vibrations in the larynx and then use our tongue, teeth and lips to modify the sounds. The diagram below shows some of the more important speech organs. This kind of diagram helps us to understand what we observe in others but is less useful in understanding our own speech. Scientists can now place small cameras into the mouths of experimental subjects, and observe some of the physical movements that accompany speech. But most of us move our vocal organs by reflexes or a sense of the sound we want to produce, and are not likely to benefit from watching movement in the vocal fold. The diagram is a simplified cross-section through the human head - which we could not see in reality in a living speaker, though a simulation might be instructive. But we do observe some external signs of speech sounds apart from what we hear.