Foneetika

Fonetika, or phonetics in English, is the branch of linguistics that studies the physical sounds of human speech: how sounds are produced (articulatory phonetics), how they propagate through air (acoustic phonetics), and how they are heard and interpreted (auditory phonetics). The term foneetika is used in several languages, including Estonian, to denote this field.

Fonetika is distinct from phonology, which examines the abstract systems of sound contrasts and their organization into phonemes within a language. While phonetics describes actual sounds and their production, phonology describes how those sounds function within a given language’s sound system.

Subfields include articulatory, acoustic, and auditory phonetics. Researchers study how the vocal tract shapes consonants and vowels, the properties of sound waves, and the perceptual cues that enable listeners to recognize speech. The discipline also addresses cross-language variation and the physiologic limits of speech production.

Methods range from perceptual experiments to instrumental techniques such as spectrography, ultrasound, and electromagnetic articulography, as well as palatography, aerodynamics measurements, and computational modeling. These tools help quantify features like place and manner of articulation, voicing, and spectral dynamics.

Applications of fonetika span speech synthesis and recognition, language documentation and revitalization, clinical linguistics and speech-language pathology, forensic phonetics, and language teaching. The field informs technologies that convert speech to text or generate natural-sounding speech, and supports analyses of speaker identity and intelligibility.

Historically, the study of speech sounds has evolved from qualitative descriptions to experimental and instrumental approaches. Notable researchers in phonetics include Peter Ladefoged and colleagues, whose work helped shape modern measurement and analysis methods. See also phonology and acoustics.