Phonetics & Phonology

Course: Language and

Communication

Aziz Ullah
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 Phonetics

 The study of human speech sounds is called

phonetics. It has three main branches.
1. Articulatory phonetics: It deals with how speech
sounds are produced/articulated.
2. Acoustic phonetics: It deals with the physical
properties of sounds or how sounds are
transmitted through the air.
3. Auditory phonetics: It deals with how speech
sounds are perceived/heard. It is also called
2 perceptual phonetics
 Key Concepts

 Phoneme (sound):
A meaning distinguishing sound is called
phoneme. E.g. Cat, hat, bat, need, meet etc.
 Phone: Different versions of the same
phoneme is called phone. E.g. talk, later, meet.
“t” in the initial, middle and final positions are
pronounced differently.
 Allophone: allo means ‘set’ and phone means
‘sound’. A set of phones is called allophone.
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 Phonology

 Phone means ‘sound’ and ‘logy’ means study

 Phonology is the study of sounds of a particular
language. For example, English sounds.
 Sounds are divided into consonants and vowels
Sound

Consonant Vowels
Sounds produced with the Sounds produced without
4 blockage of airflow the blockage of airflow
 Cont…

 There are 44 sounds in English language.

24 consonants 20 Vowels

12 Monophthongs 8 Diphthongs

A single vowel A combination of

sound two vowel sounds
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 International Phonetic Alphabets
IPA

 The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

is an alphabetic system of phonetic
notation based primarily on the Latin script.
 It was introduced by the International
Phonetic Association in the late 19th century
as a standardized representation of speech
sounds in written form.

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 Place of Articulation

I
Manner of Articulation

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8
9
 12 Monophthongs

Two dots : shows

7 short vowels long vowels. They
are 5.

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 8 Diphthongs

Combination of two vowel sounds

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 How the sounds are different from
the English Alphabets?

 There are 44 sounds or phonemes and 26

letters in English language.
 Letters are written symbols, and sounds are
spoken. It is important that these functions are
not confused.
 In English, there is not a one-to-one
relationship between letters and pronunciation.
There is mostly no correspondence between
written word and spoken word.
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 Cont…

 In ‘man’ and ‘many’, put, cut the letter ‘a’ and ‘u’
have two different pronunciations. Then
consider read, heat, death, spread. Among the
more examples of English spelling are cough,
enough, thorough, through, bough. There are
also words that sound identical but are written
in different ways: for examples,
 (Won, one), (sent, scent, cent), (air and heir)

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 Cont…

 In English alphabet, we have only five vowel

letters - A, E, I, O, U - but there are twenty
different vowel sounds.
 Similarly we have just 21 consonant letters
and 24 consonant sounds. The letter ‘g’ is in
words such as jug, magic. The letter ‘c’ in
camera, cat, centimeter, century.
 Etc.
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 The End

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