Artikulering

Artikulering, or articulation, is the production of speech sounds through the coordinated movement and shaping of the vocal tract. It is a core topic in articulatory phonetics and explains how abstract phonemes are realized as concrete sounds across languages. The main articulators include the lips, tongue, teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum, and glottis.

Sounds are categorized by place of articulation (where the constriction occurs), manner of articulation (how the constriction is formed), and voicing (whether the vocal cords vibrate). Common places of articulation include bilabial, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal; manners include stops, fricatives, nasals, liquids, and approximants. Vowels are defined mainly by tongue height and backness, with lip rounding, and may feature nasalization or tenseness in some languages. Coarticulation means that articulation for one sound overlaps with adjacent sounds, yielding context-dependent realizations.

Physically, articulation results from exhaled air passing through the larynx and oral cavity, with voicing produced by the vocal folds and constrictions formed by the articulators. The produced sounds are analyzed acoustically by patterns such as formants for vowels and voice onset time for stops, and are documented in phonetic transcription systems. Cross-language variation leads to many allophonic realizations of similar articulations.

Applied fields include speech-language pathology, where articulation disorders are treated; language teaching; forensic phonetics; and speech technology such as synthesis and automatic recognition, which rely on models of articulatory production to produce or interpret speech.