Phonetics

Phonetics is the scientific study of speech. It has a long history, going back certainly to well over two thousand years ago. The central concerns in phonetics are the discovery of how speech sounds are produced, how they are used in spoken language, how we can record speech sounds with written symbols and how we hear and recognise different sounds. In the first of these areas, when we study the production of speech sounds we can
observe what speakers do (articulatory observation) and we can try to feel what is going on inside our vocal tract (kinaesthetic observation). The second area is where phonetics overlaps with phonology: usually in phonetics we are only interested in sounds that are used in meaningful speech, and phoneticians are interested in discovering the range and variety of sounds used in this way in all the known languages of the world. This is sometimes known as linguistic phonetics. Thirdly, there has always been a need for agreed conventions for using phonetic symbols that represent speech sounds; the International
Phonetic Association has played a very important role in this. Finally, the auditory aspect of speech is very important: the ear is capable of making fine discrimination between different sounds, and sometimes it is not possible to define in articulatory terms precisely what the difference is. A good example of this is in vowel classification: while it is important to know the position and shape of the tongue and lips, it is often very important to have been trained in an agreed set of standard auditory qualities that vowels can be reliably related to.