Laying the foundations: sound systems in language

While the phonetician studies the articulatory, auditory or acoustic properties of speech sounds, the phonologist’s task is to understand how these sounds are organized in languages. In any language, a relatively small number of contrastive speech units, known as phonemes, are responsible for distinguishing all real and potential words, and native speakers quickly learn which distinctions matter for this purpose and which do not; they are also aware of the rules by which these phonemes may or may not be combined. We will look in detail at the concept of the phoneme, and consider some tests by which they may be identified.

Two speakers of the same language may have slightly different phoneme inventories, or they may use the same set of phonemes in different ways. We will learn how we as speakers recognize these accent differences, and how phonologists attempt to model what speakers unconsciously ‘know’ about the sound system of their mother tongue. We will also consider syllable structure, which proves a very important factor in determining how the sounds of a language are organized.