Hangokat

Hangokat are the basic units of sound in spoken language. In linguistic terms, a hang (plural hangok) is a sound that can distinguish words in a given language; the set of such distinguishing sounds is language-specific. The term is commonly used in Hungarian discussions to refer to phonemes or to the broader class of audible sounds produced in speech.

Hangokat are typically divided into vowels and consonants. Vowels are produced with an open vocal tract, while consonants involve constrictions of the vocal tract at various places and manners of articulation. Each hang has features such as place of articulation (for example bilabial, dental, velar), manner of articulation (stop, fricative, nasal), and voicing. Some languages also use phonemic features like tone, stress, or vowel length to distinguish meaning. Phonemic status means that changing the sound can create a new word, while allophonic variants do not change meaning in certain contexts.

Phonemes are usually represented in writing with letters or digraphs, and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used for precise, language-agnostic representation. The relationship between hangokat and orthography can be one-to-many or many-to-one; for example, in Hungarian, several letters and digraphs map to a single phoneme, and some phonemes are written with multiple letters.

Cross-linguistically, hangokat vary widely in inventory and in how they combine. Phonetics studies their physical properties; phonology studies their systematic organization. Knowledge about hangokat informs literacy, language teaching, speech pathology, and voice recognition.