Fonetikka

Fonetikka, also known as phonetics, is the branch of linguistics that studies the physical properties of speech sounds. It covers how sounds are produced by the vocal tract (articulatory phonetics), how they are transmitted through air as sound waves (acoustic phonetics), and how they are heard and processed by the auditory system (auditory phonetics). The field aims to describe and classify sounds in all languages and to understand the limits and variation in human speech.

Phonetics is distinct from phonology, which focuses on the abstract, language-specific systems of sounds and their patterns. Phonetics relies on empirical methods and instrumentation, including spectrographic analysis, waveform measures, and imaging techniques such as ultrasound and MRI. Transcription typically uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) with diacritics to capture precise articulatory features like place and manner of articulation, voicing, aspiration, and nasalization.

Subfields include experimental/laboratory phonetics, articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, auditory/psychoacoustic phonetics, clinical phonetics, forensic phonetics, and historical phonetics. Applications span language teaching, speech-language pathology, speech recognition, and speech synthesis. Researchers study vowels’ formants, consonants’ spectra, voice quality, and prosodic cues, among other features, to understand how speech is produced, transmitted, and perceived across languages and speaker populations.

History: Modern phonetics developed in the 19th and 20th centuries with the standardization of transcription through the IPA. It is a foundational field for linguistic analysis and cross-linguistic comparison, providing tools to document endangered languages and to improve technologies that process spoken language.