What is Phonetics and Why do we Study it?
PHONETICS
Phonetics can also be defined as the scientific study of speech sounds. We divide phonetics into 3 main areas:
1. Articulatory Phonetics:
We study the speech organs which are used in producing speech, these usually include lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palatal, soft palatal (velum), tongue (which is divided into tip, centre, front, back and root). We shall discuss these organs in another post. You can watch my video, where I have described all these parts with their illustrations. I have two videos on speech organs, one is in more detail than the other.
DETAILED VIDEOS ON SPEECH ORGANS AND PLACES OF ARTICULATION
BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO SPEECH ORGANS AND PLACES OF ARTICULATION
2. Acoustic Phonetics:
It is the study of sound waves and how they actually travel in air and reaches to our ear. We study spectrogram, waveform, formants, pitch, frequency, and such types of concepts in this area. This is a very important area of phonetics; it requires a significant amount of skill to become a good acoustic phonetician. I have described some of the aspects about acoustic phonetics in my videos.
3. Auditory Phonetics:
This area of phonetics deals with the perception of speech sounds by our ears and then how the brain and the nervous system are involved in this process. Phoneticians who are skilful in this field may adopt the profession of speech pathologist, although a skilful person in one area of phonetics have the significant amount of information about other areas as well.
Besides these main areas, we have some other areas too which might not be very common sometimes.
Anthrophonetics or sometimes called general phonetics deals with the total range of speech sounds which we can produce through our vocal tract. As the prefix "anthro" suggests that an anthrophonetician studies the speech sounds in different languages and how some sounds may or may not be in one language or the other. So, in this way, they can find the total number of speech sounds in known languages or which they are studying, Furthermore, they can compare these sounds as well.
Close to this we have linguistic phonetics which is actually concerned with the examination of speech sounds in one language or languages.
Interestingly, phonetics is also considered a separate discipline from linguistics.
Why we need to study phonetics?
1. We might want to look at the speech sounds in different languages and we are interested in their comparison.
2. We might be interested in the studying of cognition involved in speaking and listening.
3. We might want to want to treat people who have problems in producing speech (speech pathology).
4. There are some among us who just want to speak an accent like native speakers.
5. There are many people who study that how the computers can understand human speech.
So, for all these purposes, we need to study phonetics or some of its concepts. Interestingly, many famous celebrities, singers, prime ministers, and public speakers around the world gets training from phoneticians to speak a better accent.
On You Tube, I am delivering detailed lectures on Phonetics both in URDU and ENGLISH, if you are interested you can follow these links:
Brief Introductions:
Detailed Introductions:
References:
1. Yule, G. (2020) The Study of Language (7th edition) Cambridge University Press
2. Ladefoged, P. & Johnson, K. (2015) A Course in Phonetics (7th edition) CENGAGE Learning
3. Trask, L.R. (1996) A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology Routledge
Read my other blogs:
Content is too understandable! 👍
ReplyDelete