PHONETICS

What is phonetics?

 
Phonetics is the systematic study of speech and the sounds of language.

• Articulatory Phonetics - describes how vowels and consonants are produced or “articulated” in various parts of the mouth and throat.
• Acoustic Phonetics - a study of how speech sounds are transmitted: when sound travels through the air from the speaker's mouth to the hearer's ear it does so in the form of vibrations in the air.
• Auditory Phonetics - a study of how speech sounds are perceived: looks at the way in which the hearer’s brain decodes the sound waves back into the vowels and consonants originally intended by the speaker. 
  
  The actual sound produced, such as a simple vowel or consonant sound is called phone.

 

The English Alphabet

The English alphabet has 26 letters. Each letter has a lower and upper case form. The letters A, E, I, O, U are vowels.

The Sounds of English and Their Representation

In English, there is no one-to-one relation between the system of writing and the system of pronunciation. The alphabet which we use to write English has 26 letters but in (Standard British) English there are approximately 44 speach sounds. The number of speech sounds in English varies from dialect to dialect, and any actual tally depends greatly on the interpretation of the researcher doing the counting. To represent the basic sound of spoken languages linguists use a set of phonetic symbols called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The chart below contains all of the IPA symbols used to represent the sounds of the English language. This is the standard set of phonemic symbols for English (RP and similar accents).

Vowels and Consonants (en/bg)

Classifying the Vowels Sounds of English

The classifcation of vowels is based on four major aspects:

1. Tongue height - according to the vertical position of the tongue (high vowels, also referred to as close; low vowels, also referred to as open; intermediate - close-mid and open-mid)
2. Frontness vs. backness of the tongue - according to the horizontal position of the highest part of the tongue.
3. Lip rounding - whether the lips are rounded (O-shape) or spread (no rounding) when the sound is being made.
4. Tenseness of the articulators - refers to the amount of muscular tension around the mouth when creating vowel sounds. Tense and lax are used to describe muscular tension.
   
   

 

Classifying the Consonants Sounds of English According to the Manner and Place of Articulation

According to the manner of articulation (how the breath is used) the consonants are: stops, also known as plosives, fricatives, affricates, nasals, laterals, and approximants. Nasals, laterals and approximants are always voiced; stops, fricatives and affricates can be voiced or unvoiced.

Bilabial: where lips come together as in /p-b/. examples are: /bat/, /pat/

2.      Labio-dental: where lower lip and the upper teeth come together as in /f-v/ examples are: /fan/, /van/

3.      Dental: where tip of the tongue meets the upper teeth as in /Š – †/

4.      Alveolar: where tip touches alveolar ridge as in /t-d,s-z,n,l,r/ examples are: /tap/, /dip/ and /zip/ etc.

5.      Palato–Alveolar: requires two points of contact: tip close to the alveolar ridge which front of the tongue is concave to the roof of the mouth as in /S – 3, t‰ – d½ /. Examples are: /ship/, /chip/ and /jug/

6.      Palatal: front of the tongue approximates to the hard palate. It is possible to have palatal plosives, fricatives, laterals and nasals but in English only palatal sound is voiced, semi-vowel /j/. as in /yes/

7.      Velar: where back of the tongue meets the soft palate. In English, we have four velars as / k,g, ÷,w/. Examples are: /kick/, /whip/ etc.