Fonetiline

Fonetiline is the Estonian term for phonetic, used to describe the study, description, and notation of speech sounds in their physical properties and perceptual effects. In international usage, phonetics covers the empirical study of how sounds are articulated, transmitted as sound waves, and heard by listeners, regardless of their linguistic function.

Phonetics is commonly divided into articulatory phonetics (how the vocal tract produces sounds), acoustic phonetics (the properties of sound waves), and perceptual phonetics (how listeners perceive sounds). The term fonetiline can refer to analyses in any of these areas. In practice, researchers use transcription to represent sounds.

Phonetic transcription uses brackets [ ] for narrow, detailed rendering of actual speech, sometimes with diacritics to indicate voicing, aspiration, or tongue position; or slashes / / for broad phonemic transcription, which captures only the contrastive sounds of a language. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is the most widely used system.

Fonetiline contrasts with phonemic analysis, which aims to describe a sound system in terms of contrastive units (phonemes) rather than the exact phonetic realization. Phonetics often informs phonology, acoustics, speech technology, and language pedagogy.

Applications include language documentation, speech therapy, forensic phonetics, accent training, and speech-recognition research. Although focused on analysis of sounds, fonetiline findings are used alongside linguistic theory to understand how languages deploy and perceive speech.