Phonology

What is the definition of Phonology?

The word phonology comes from Greek , phn, "voice, sound", and the suffix -logy (which is from Greek , lgos, "word, speech, subject of discussion"). Phonology is a specialized study of the way sounds are organized in a language. It is obvious that each language has its own sets of sounds used to form words. It is also possible for languages to borrow sound patterns from a different language and adapt the words to suit the existing set of sounds in that language. Phonology is closely related to other aspects of language and linguistics that include pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology and phonetics.

How is Phonology different from Phonetics?

Phonetics forms the basis for phonological analysis in the hierarchy of the linguistic levels of a language. It relates to the production of any speech sound irrespective of the language. Phonology, on the other hand, is the basis for further research in morphology and semantics. Phonology analyzes the speech sounds of a specific language determining the si What is the place of Phonetics in Phonology? Phonology makes use of special symbols that represent speech sounds called phonetics. English makes use of the International Phonetic Alphabet or the IPA which identifies specific symbols for different speech sounds which involve vowels and consonants. The letters b, d, f, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, z have the conventional sound in English spelling. significant sound patterns and their interpretation by the native speaker of the language. Vowel sounds are different from consonant sounds as the air passage has little obstruction and is basically determined by the position of the tongue and the lips. Thus we have the classification of vowels as front, back or central vowels. Phonology also recognizes the position of the lips while pronouncing the vowel so that they can be a rounded or spread vowel.

What are the elements of Phonology?

Phonology deals with the sound system of a language and involves the actual sound of words which is made up of the phoneme-the smallest unit of pronunciation. The different phonemes used in words result in new words as phonemes basically contrast with each other. In the words, rat, fat and mat the initial phoneme is different and result in different words. Another aspect of phonology is the prosody which refers to the pitch or rhythm of speech and contributes to the music of a language.

What is Phonological Awareness?

Phonemic awareness refers to being aware of the individual sounds or phonemes of a language. Phonemic awareness is just a part of the larger Phonological awareness which includes an awareness of different soundsof language that may be to recognize sounds, add sounds, take apart sounds or move sounds around. Thus phonological awareness is associated with larger units of onsets, rimes and syllables.

Development of phonology
The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, the Sanskrit grammar composed by Pini in the 4th century BC. In particular the Shiva Sutras, an auxiliary text to theAshtadhyayi, introduces what can be considered a list of the phonemes of the Sanskrit language, with a notational system for them that is used throughout the main text, which deals with matters of morphology, syntax and semantics. The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (together with his former student Mikoaj Kruszewski) introduced the concept of the phoneme in 1876, and his work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of phonetic alternations (what is now called allophony and morphophonology), and had a significant influence on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. An influential school of phonology in the interwar period was the Prague School. One of its leading members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology),[3] published posthumously in 1939, is among the most important works in the field from this period. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, although this

concept had also been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague School was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century. In 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), the basis for Generative Phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features. These features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set, and have the binary values + or . There are at least two levels of representation: underlying representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so called surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the Generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural Phonology was a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and (more explicitly) in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes which interact with one another; which ones are active and which are suppressed are language-specific. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously (though the output of one process may be the input to another). The second-most prominent Natural Phonologist is Stampe's wife, Patricia Donegan; there are many Natural Phonologists in Europe, though also a few others in the U.S., such as Geoffrey Nathan. The principles of Natural Phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler, who founded Natural Morphology. In 1976 John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological phenomena are no longer seen as operating on one linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or feature combinations, but rather as involving some parallel sequences of features which reside on multiple tiers. Autosegmental phonology later evolved into Feature Geometry, which became the standard theory of representation for the theories of the organization of phonology as different as Lexical Phonology and Optimality Theory. Government Phonology, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection

of certain binary parameters. That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially the same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, though parameters may sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures include Jonathan Kaye, Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette, John Harris, and many others. In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed Optimality Theory an overall architecture for phonology according to which languages choose a pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints which is ordered by importance: a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, and has become a dominant trend in phonology. Though this usually goes unacknowledged, Optimality Theory was strongly influenced by Natural Phonology; both view phonology in terms of constraints on speakers and their production, though these constraints are formalized in very different ways. [citation needed] The appeal to phonetic grounding of constraints in various approaches has been criticized by proponents of 'substance-free phonology' [5]. Broadly speaking government phonology (or its descendant, strict-CV phonology) has a greater following in the United Kingdom, whereas optimality theory is predominant in North America.

Overview of phonemes
An important part of traditional forms of phonology has been studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes. For example, in English, the "p" sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced [p]), while that in spot is not aspirated (pronounced [p]). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones) of the same phonological category, that is, of the phoneme /p/. (Traditionally, it would be argued that if a word-initial aspirated [p] were interchanged with the unaspirated [p] in spot, native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as "the same" /p/.) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes in those languages. For example, in Thai, Hindi, and Quechua, there are minimal pairs of words for which aspiration is the only contrasting feature (two words with different meanings that are identical except that one has an aspirated sound where the other has an unaspirated one).

Phoneme inventories

Part of the phonological study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. Even though a language may make distinctions between a small number of phonemes, speakers actually produce many more phonetic sounds. Thus, a phoneme in a particular language can be instantiated in many ways. Traditionally, looking for minimal pairs forms part of the research in studying the phoneme inventory of a language. A minimal pair is a pair of words from the same language, that differ by only a single categorical sound, and that are recognized by speakers as being two different words. When there is a minimal pair, the two sounds are said to be examples of realizations of distinct phonemes. However, since it is often impossible to detect or agree to the existence of all the possible phonemes of a language with this method, other approaches are used as well. The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these later changed into separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics

Phonemic distinctions or allophones

If two similar sounds do not belong to separate phonemes, they are called allophones of the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) can be aspirated. In English, voiceless stops at the beginning of a stressed syllable (but not after /s/) are aspirated, whereas after /s/ they are not aspirated. This can be seen by putting the fingers right in front of the lips and noticing the difference in breathiness in sayingpin versus spin. There is no English word pin that starts with an unaspirated p, therefore in English, aspirated [p] (the [] means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allophones of the same phoneme /p/. This is an example of a complementary distribution. The /t/ sounds in the words tub, stub, but, butter, and button are all pronounced differently in American English, yet are all intuited to be of "the same sound", therefore they constitute another example of allophones of the same phoneme in English. However, an intuition such as this could be interpreted as a function of post-lexical recognition of the sounds. That is, all are seen as examples of English /t/ once the word itself has been recognized. The findings and insights of speech perception and articulation research complicates this idea of interchangeable allophones being perceived as the same phoneme, no matter how attractive it might be for linguists who wish to rely on the intuitions of native speakers. First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can result in unrecognizable words. Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is highly co-articulated, so it is problematic to think that one can splice words into simple segments without affecting speech perception. In other words, interchanging allophones is a nice idea for intuitive linguistics, but it turns out that this idea cannot transcend what co-articulation actually does to spoken sounds. Yet human speech perception is so robust and versatile (happening under various conditions) because, in part, it can deal with such co-articulation. There are different methods for determining why allophones should fall categorically under a specified phoneme. Counter-intuitively, the principle of phonetic similarity is not always used. This tends to make the phoneme seem abstracted away from the phonetic realities of speech. It should be remembered that, just because allophones can be grouped under phonemes for the purpose of linguistic analysis, this does not necessarily mean that this is an actual process in the way the human brain processes a language. On the other hand, it could be pointed out that some sort of analytic notion of a language beneath the word level is usual if the language is written alphabetically. So one could also speak of a phonology of reading and writing.

Other topics in phonology

In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, i.e. replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs), as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation. Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on what sounds can appear in what positions in a given language) and phonological alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through the application of phonological rules, sometimes in a given order which can be feeding or bleeding,[6]) as well as prosody, the study of suprasegmentalsand topics such as stress and intonation. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. The same principles have been applied to the analysis of sign languages , even though the sublexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds. On the other hand, it must be noted, it is difficult to analyze phonologically a language one does not speak, and most phonological analysis takes place with recourse to phonetic information.

The physics and physiology of speech

Man is to distinguished from the other primates by having the apparatus 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 thevocal 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.

A few people have the ability to interpret most of a speaker's utterances from lip-reading. But many more have a sense of when the lip-movement does or does not correspond to what we hear - we notice this when we watch a feature film with dubbed dialogue, or a TV broadcast where the sound is not synchronized with what we see. The diagram can also prove useful in conjunction with descriptions of sounds - for example indicating where the airflow is constricted to produce fricatives, whether on the palate, thealveolar ridge, the teeth or the teeth and lips together. Speech therapists have a very detailed working knowledge of the physiology of human speech, and of exercises and remedies to overcome difficulties some of us encounter in speaking, where these have physical causes. An understanding of the anatomy is also useful to various kinds of expert who train people to use their voices in special or unusual ways. These would include singing teachers and voice coaches for actors, as well as the even more specialized coaches who train actors to produce the speech sounds of hitherto unfamiliar varieties of English or other languages. At a more basic level, my French teacher at school insisted that we (his pupils) could produce certain vowel sounds only with our mouths more open than we would ever need to do while speaking English. And a literally stiff upper lip is a great help if one wishes to mimic the speech sounds of Queen Elizabeth II.

So what happens? Mostly we use air that is moving out of our lungs (pulmonic egressive air) to speak. We may pause while breathing in, or try to use the ingressive air - but this is likely to produce quiet speech, which is unclear to our listeners. (David Crystal notes how the normally balanced respiratory cycle is altered by speech, so that we breathe out slowly, using the air for speech, and breathe in swiftly, in order to keep talking). In languages other than English, speakers may also use non-pulmonic sound, such as clicks (found in southern Africa) or glottalic sounds (found worldwide). In the larynx, the vocal

folds set up vibrations in the egressive air. The vibrating air passes through further cavities which can modify the sound and finally are articulated by the passive (immobile) articulators - the hard palate, the alveolar ridge and the upper teeth - and the active (mobile) articulators. These are the pharynx, the velum (or soft palate), the jaw and lower teeth, the lips and, above all, the tongue. This is so important and so flexible an organ, that language scientists identify different regions of the tongue by name, as these are associated with particular sounds. Working outwards these are: the back - opposite the soft palate the centre - opposite the meeting point of hard and soft palate the front - opposite the hard palate the blade - the tapering area facing the ridge of teeth the tip - the extreme end of the tongue

The first three of these (back, centre and front) are known together as the dorsum (which is Latin for backbone or spine)

Phonology, phonemes and phonetics

You may have known for some time that the suffix -phone is to do with sounds. Think, for instance, of telephone, microphone, gramophone and xylophone. The morpheme comes from Greek phonema, which means a sound. Telephone means distant sound

Microphone means small sound (because it sends an input to an amplifier which in turn drives loudspeakers - so the original sound is small compared to the output sound) Gramophone was originally a trade name. It comes from inverting the original form,phonograph (=sound-writing) - so called because the sound caused a needle to trace a pattern on a wax cylinder. The process is reversed for playing the sound back Xylophone means wood sound (because the instrument is one of very few where the musical note is produced simply by making wood resonate)

The fundamental unit of grammar is a morpheme. A basic unit of written language is agrapheme. And the basic unit of sound is a phoneme. However, this is technically what Professor Crystal describes as the smallest contrastive unit and it is highly useful to you in explaining things - but strictly speaking may not exist in real spoken language use. That is, almost anything you say is a continuum and you rarely assemble a series of discrete sounds into a connected whole. (It is possible to do this with synthesized speech, as used by Professor Stephen Hawking - but the result is so different from naturally occurring speech that we can recognize it instantly.) And there is no perfect or single right way to say anything - which is just as well, because we can never exactly reproduce a previous performance. However, in your comments on phonology, you will certainly want sometimes to focus on single phonemes or small sequences of phonemes. A phoneme is a sound segment of words or syllables. Quite a good way to understand how it may indicate meaning is to consider how replacing it with another phoneme will change the word - so if we replace the middle sound in bad we can make bawd, bed, bid, bird and bud. (In two cases here one letter is replaced with two letters but in all these cases it is a single vowel sound that changes.)

The first people to write in English used an existing alphabet - the Roman alphabet, which was itself adapted from the Greek alphabet for writing in Latin. (In the Roman empire, Latin was the official language of government and administration, and especially of the army but in the eastern parts of the empire Greek was the official language, and in Rome Greek was spoken as widely as Latin, according to F.F. Bruce, in The Books and the Parchments, Chapter 5). Because these first writers of English (Latin-speaking Roman monks) had more sounds than letters, they used the same letters to represent different sounds - perhaps making the assumption that the reader would recognize the word, and supply the appropriate sounds. It would be many years before anyone would think it possible to have more consistent spelling, and this has never been a realistic option for writers of English, though spelling has changed over time. And, in any case, the sounds of Old English are not exactly the same as the sounds of modern English.

As linguists have become aware of more and more languages, many with sounds never heard in English, they have tried to create a comprehensive set of symbols to correspond to features of sound - vowels, consonants, clicks and glottalic sounds and non-segmental or suprasegmental features, such as stress and tone. Among many schemes used by

linguists one has perhaps more authority than most, as it is the product of the International Phonetic Association (IPA). In the table below, you will see the phonetic characters that correspond to the phonemes used in normal spoken English. To give examples is problematic, as no two speakers will produce the same sound. In the case of the vowels and a few consonants, the examples will not match the sounds produced by all speakers - they reflect the variety of accent known as Received Pronunciation or RP. Note that RP is not specific to any region, but uses more of the sounds found in the south and midlands than in the north. It is a socially prestigious accent, favoured in greater or less degree by broadcasters, civil servants, barristers and people who record speaking clock messages. It is not fixed and has changed measurably in the last 50 years. But to give one example, the sound represented by is not common to all UK native speakers. In many parts of London and the south-east of England the sound represented by f will be substituted. So, in an advertisement, the mother-in-law of Vinnie Jones (former soccer player for Wimbledon and Wales; now an actor) says: I fought 'e was a big fug (/a ft i: wz bg fug/).

You may also wonder what has happened to the letter x. This is used in English to represent two consonant sounds, those of k and s or of k and z. In phonetic transcription these symbols will be used. Consonant and vowel each have two related but distinct meanings in English. In writing of phonology, you need to make the distinction clear. When you were younger you may have learned that b,c,d,f and so on are consonants while a,e,i,o,u are vowels - and you may have wondered about y. In this case consonants and vowels denote the letters that commonly represent the relevant sounds. Phonologists are interested in vowel and consonant soundsand the phonetic symbols that represent these (including vowel and consonant letters). It may be wise for you to use the words consonant and vowel (alone) to denote the sounds. But it is better to use an unambiguous phrase - and write or speak about consonant orvowel sounds, consonant or vowel letters and consonant or vowel symbols. In most words these sounds can be identified, but there are some cases where we move from one vowel to another to create an effect that is like neither - and these are diphthongs. We also have some triphthongs - where three vowel sounds come in succession in words such as fire, power and sure. (But this depends on the speaker many of us alter the sounds so that we say our as if it were are.) For convenience you may prefer the term vowel glides - and say that fine and boy contain two-vowel glides while fire contains a three-vowel glide.

IPA symbols for the sounds of English

The examples show the letters in bold that correspond to the sound that they illustrate. You will find guidance below on how to use these symbols in electronic documents. The IPA distributes audio files in analog and digital form, with specimen pronunciations of these sounds. The document in the frame below uses unicode symbols. If you do not see them, then you can open a PDF version of the page.

A phoneme is a speech sound that helps us construct meaning. That is, if we replace it with another sound (where this is possible) we get a new meaning or no meaning at all. If I replace the initial consonant (/r/) from rubble, I can get double or Hubble (astronomer for whom the space telescope is named) or meaningless forms (as regards the lexicon of standard English) like fubble and wubble. The same thing happens if I change the vowel and get rabble, rebel, Ribble (an English river) and the nonsense form robble. (I have used the conventional spelling of rebel here, but to avoid confusion should perhaps use phonetic transcription, so that replacements would always appear in the same position as the character they replace.)

But what happens when a phoneme is adapted to the spoken context in which it occurs, in ways that do not alter the meaning either for speaker or hearer? Rather than say these are different phonemes that share the same meaning we use the model of allophones, which are variants of a phoneme. Thus if we isolate the l sound in the initial position in lick and in the final position in ball, we should be able to hear that the sound is (physically) different as is the way our speech organs produce it. Technically, in the second case, the back of the tongue is raised towards the velum or soft palate. The initial l sound is called clear l, while the terminal l sound is sometimes called a dark l. When we want to show the detail ofphonetic variants or allophones we enclose the symbols in square brackets whereas in transcribing sounds from a phonological viewpoint we use slant lines. So, using the IPA transcription [l] is clear l, while [] is dark l.

If this is not clear think:

Am I only describing a sound (irrespective of how this sound fits into a system, has meaning and so on)? If so, use square brackets. Am I trying to show how the sound is part of a wider system (irrespective of how exactly it sounds in a given instance)? If so, use slant brackets. So long as we need a form of transcription, we will rely on the IPA scheme. But increasingly it is possible to use digital recording and reproduction to produce reference versions of sounds. This would not, of course, prevent change in the choice of which particular sounds to use in a given context. When people wonder about harass (hrs) or harass (hrs) they usually are able to articulate either, and are concerned about which reveals them as more or less educated in the use of the proper form. (For your information, the stress historically falls on the first syllable, to rhyme with embarrass thus in both Pocket Oxford[UK, 1969] and Funk & Wagnalls New Practical Standard [US, 1946]. The fashion forhu-rass is found on both sides of the Atlantic and we should not credit it to, or blame it on, US speakers of English.)

Phonologists also refer to segments. A segment is a discrete unit that can be identified in a stream of speech, according to Professor Crystal. In English the segments would correspond to vowel sounds and consonant sounds, say. This is a clear metaphor if we think of fruit - the number of segments varies, but is finite in a whole fruit. So some languages have few segments and others many - from 11 in Rotokas and Mura to 141 in ! Xu. The term may be most helpful in indicating what non-segmental or supra-segmental (above the segments) features of spoken language are.

The sounds of English

Vowels Front vowels | Central vowels | Back vowels English has twelve vowel sounds. In the table above they are divided into seven short and five long vowels. An alternative way of organizing them is according to where (in the mouth) they are produced. This method allows us to describe them as front, central and back. We can qualify them further by how high the tongue and lower jaw are when we make these vowel sounds, and by whether our lips are rounded or spread, and finally by whether they are short or long. This scheme shows the following arrangement: Front vowels /i:/ - cream, seen (long high front spread vowel) // - bit, silly (short high front spread vowel)

// - bet, head (short mid front spread vowel); this may also be shown by the symbol /e/ // - cat, dad (short low front spread vowel); this may also be shown by /a/

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Central vowels /:/- burn, firm (long mid central spread vowel); this may also be shown by the symbol /:/. // - about, clever (short mid central spread vowel); this is sometimes known asschwa, or the neutral vowel sound - it never occurs in a stressed position. // - cut, nut (short low front spread vowel); this vowel is quite uncommon among speakers in the Midlands and further north in Britain. Back to top

Back vowels

/u:/ - boob, glue (long high back rounded vowel) // - put, soot (short high back rounded vowel); also shown by /u/ /:/ - corn, faun (long mid back rounded vowel) also shown by /o:/ //- dog, rotten (short low back rounded vowel) also shown by /o/ /:/ - hard, far (long low back spread vowel)

We can also arrange the vowels in a table or even depict them against a cross-section of the human mouth. Here is an example of a simple table:

Front High Mid Low i:

Central

Back u:

: :

Diphthongs
Diphthongs are sounds that begin as one vowel and end as another, while gliding between them. For this reason they are sometimes described as glide vowels. How many are there? Almost every modern authority says eight - but they do not all list the same eight (check this for yourself). Simeon Potter, in Our Language (Potter, S, [1950] Chapter VI, Sounds and Spelling, London, Penguin) says there are nine - and lists those I have shown in the table above, all of which I have found in the modern reference works. The one most usually omitted is // as in bored. Many speakers do not use this diphthong, but use the same vowel in poured as in fraud - but it is alive and well in the north of Britain. Potter notes that all English diphthongs are falling - that is the first element is stressed more than the second. Other languages have rising diphthongs, where the second element is stressed, as in Italian uomo (man) and uovo (egg).

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Consonants Voicing | Articulation described by region | Articulation described by manner Some authorities claim one or two fewer consonants than I have shown above, regarding those with double symbols (/t/ and /d/) as diphthong consonants in Potter's phrase. The list omits one sound that is not strictly a consonant but works like one. The full IPA list of phonetic symbols includes some for non-pulmonic consonants (not made with air coming from the lungs), click and glottal sounds. In some varieties of English, especially in the south of Britain (but the sound has migrated north) we find the glottal plosive or glottal stop, shown by the symbol // (essentially a question mark without the dot at the tail). This sound occurs in place of /t/ for some speakers - so /botl/ or /botl/ (bottle) become/bol/ or /bol/. We form consonants by controlling or impeding the egressive (outward) flow of air. We do this with the articulators - from the glottis, past the velum, the hard palate and alveolar ridgeand the tongue, to the teeth and lips. The sound results from three things: voicing - causing the vocal cords to vibrate where the articulation happens how the articulation happens - how the airflow is controlled

Voicing
All vowels must be voiced - they are caused by vibration in the vocal cords. But consonants may be voiced or not. Some of the consonant sounds of English come in pairs that differ in being voiced or not - in which case they are described as voiceless or unvoiced. So /b/ is voiced and /p/ is the unvoiced consonant in one pair, while voiced /g/ and voiceless /k/ form another pair. We can explain the consonant sounds by the place where the articulation principally occurs or by the kinds of articulation that occurs there. The first scheme gives us this arrangement: Articulation described by region

 Glottal articulation - articulation by the glottis. We use this for one consonant in English. This is /h/ in initial position in house or hope. Velar articulation - we do this with the back of the tongue against the velum. We use it for initial hard /g/ (as in golf) and for final // (as in gong). Palatal articulation - we do this with the front of the tongue on the hard palate. We use it for /d/ (as in jam) and for // (as in sheep or sugar). Alveolar articulation - we do this with the tongue blade on the alveolar ridge. We use it for /t/ (as in teeth), /d/ (as in dodo) /z/ (as in zebra) /n/ (as in no) and /l/ (as inlight). Dental articulation - we do this with the tip of the tongue on the back of the upper front teeth. We use it for // (as in think) and // (as in that). This is one form of articulation that we can observe and feel ourselves doing. Labio-dental articulation - we do this with the lower lip and upper front teeth. We use it for /v/ (as in vampire). Labial articulation - we do this with the lips for /b/ (as in boat) and /m/ (as in most). Where we use two lips (as in English) this is bilabial articulation.

Articulation described by manner

This scheme gives us a different arrangement into stop(or plosive) consonants, affricates, fricatives, nasal consonants, laterals and approximants. Stop consonants (so-called because the airflow is stopped) or plosive consonants(because it is subsequently released, causing an outrush of air and a burst of sound) are: o o o Bilabial voiced /b/ (as in boat) and voiceless /p/ (as in post) Alveolar voiced /d/ (as in dad) and voiceless /t/ (as in tap) Velar voiced /g/ (as in golf) and voiceless /k/ (as in cow)

Affricates are a kind of stop consonant, where the expelled air causes friction rather than plosion. They are palatal /t/ (as in cheat) and palatal /d/ (as in jam)

 Fricatives come from restricting, but not completely stopping, the airflow. The air passes through a narrow space and the sound arises from the friction this produces. They come in voiced and unvoiced pairs: o o o Labio-dental voiced /v/ (as in vole) and unvoiced /f/ (as in foal) Dental voiced // (as in those) and unvoiced // (as in thick) Alveolar voiced /z/ (as in zest) and unvoiced /s/ (as in sent)

o Palatal voiced // (as in the middle of leisure) and unvoiced // (as at the end of trash) Nasal consonants involve closing the articulators but lowering the uvula, which normally closes off the route to the nose, through which the air escapes. There are three nasal consonants in English: o o o Bilabial /m/ (as in mine) Alveolar /n/ (as in nine) Velar // (as at the end of gong)

Lateral consonants allow the air to escape at the sides of the tongue. In English there is only one such sound, which is alveolar /l/ (as at the start of lamp) Approximants do not impede the flow of air. They are all voiced but are counted as consonants chiefly because of how they function in syllables. They are: o o o Bilabial /w/ (as in water) Alveolar /r/ (as in road) Palatal /j/ (as in yet)

Syllables
When you think of individual sounds, you may think of them in terms of syllables. These are units of phonological organization and smaller than words. Alternatively, think of them as units of rhythm. Although they may contain several sounds, they combine them in ways that create the effect of unity. Thus splash is a single syllable but it combines three consonants, a vowel, and a final consonant /spl++/. Some words have a single syllable - so they are monosyllables or monosyllabic. Others have more than one syllable and are polysyllables or polysyllabic.

Sometimes you may see a word divided into its syllables, but this may be an artificial exercise, since in real speech the sounds are continuous. In some cases it will be impossible to tell whether a given consonant was ending one syllable of beginning another. It is possible, for example, to pronounce lamppost so that there are two /p/ sounds in succession with some interval between them. But many native English speakers will render this as /lm-pst/ or /lm-psd/. Students of language may find it helpful to be able to identify individual syllables in explaining pronunciation and language change - one of the things you may need to do is explain which are the syllables that are stressed in a particular word or phrase.

Different ways of representing sound

Conventions of language science and lexicographers If you study reference works you may find a variety of schemes for representing different aspects of phonology - there is no single universal scheme that covers everything you may need to do. And many dictionaries may not even use the IPA alphabet, for the very obvious reason that the reader is not familiar with this transcription and can cope without it.

The text above comes from the Pocket Oxford Dictionary - this shows a simple phonetic representation based on the standard Western alphabet, with accents to show different vowels. Look in any dictionary you have and you may find something similar.

Literary models
In representing speech - for example in drama, poetry or prose fiction - some authors are interested not merely in the words but also in how they are spoken. One of the most familiar concerns is that of how to represent regional accents. Here is a fairly early example, from the second chapter of Wuthering Heights (1847), in which the servant Joseph refuses to admit Mr. Lockwood into the house: 'T' maister's dahn I't' fowld. Goa rahnd by the end ut' laith, if yah went to spake tull him Tennyson (1809-1892) has a similar approach in his poem, Northern Farmer, Old Style: What atta stannin' theer fur, and doesn' bring me the ale? Doctor's a 'tottler, lass, and 'e's allus i' the owd tale...

Joseph comes from what is now West Yorkshire, while Tennyson's farmer is supposedly from the north of Lincolnshire. Here is an earlier example, from Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian (1830), which shows some phonetic qualities of the lowlands Scots accent. In this passage the Laird of Dumbiedikes (from the country near Edinburgh) is on his deathbed. He advises his son about how to take his drink: My father tauld me sae forty years sin', but I never fand time to mind him. - Jock, ne'er drink brandy in the morning, it files the stamach sair...

George Bernard Shaw, in Pygmalion (1914), uses one phonetic character ( - schwa) in his attempt to represent the accent of Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl: There's menners f' yer! T-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad...Will ye-oo py me f'them. However, after a few sentences of phonetic dialogue, Shaw reverts to standard spelling, noting: Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London. In Pygmalion Professor Higgins teaches Eliza to speak in an upper-class accent, so as to pass her off as a duchess. In the course of the play, therefore, her accent changes. Theactress playing the part, however, may have a natural accent closer to that with which Eliza speaks at the completion of her education, so in playing the part she may doing the reverse of what Eliza undergoes, by gradually reverting to a natural manner of articulation. (Eliza's pronunciation improves ahead of her understanding of grammar, so that at one point she says memorably: My aunt died of influenza: so they said. But it's my belief they done the old woman in.) In Pygmalion Shaw does not merely represent accent (and other features of speech) but makes this crucial to an exploration of how speech relates to identity and social class.

Charles Dickens is particularly interested in the sounds of speech. He observes that many speakers have difficulty with initial /v/ and /w/. Sam Weller, in The Pickwick Papers, regularly transposes these: 'Vell,' said Sam at length, 'if this don't beat cock-fightin' nothin' never vill...That wery next house...'

Mr. Hubble, in Great Expectations does, the same thing when he describes young people as naterally wicious. Joe Gargery, in the same novel, has many verbal peculiarities, of which perhaps the most striking is in his description of the Blacking Warehouse. This is less impressive than the picture Joe has seen on bills where it is drawd too architectooralooral. In Chapter 16 of Our Mutual Friend, Betty Higden is proud of Mr. Sloppy (an orphan she has fostered) not only because he can read, but because he is able to use different voice styles for various speakers. You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices. Dickens also finds a way to show tempo and rhythm. In Chapter 23 of Little Dorrit (and elsewhere in the novel), Flora Finching speaks at length and without any pauses: Most unkind never to have come back to see us since that day, though naturally it was not to be expected that there should be any attraction at our house and you were much more pleasantly engaged, that's pretty certain, and is she fair or dark blue eyes or black I wonder, not that I expect that she should be anything but a perfect contrast to me in all particulars for I am a disappointment as I very well know and you are quite right to be devoted no doubt though what am I saying Arthur never mind I hardly know myself Good gracious!