Lydkarakter

Lydkarakter is a linguistic term used to describe the sound character of a speech sound within a language. It refers to how a sound is realized in speech—the phonetic identity and its contrastive properties—rather than its written form. The concept is used to connect the written letter or digraph to its spoken realization in a given language or dialect.

In phonology and phonetics, lydkarakter is described in terms of articulatory features (place and manner of articulation, voicing) and acoustic properties. It is common to encode lydkarakter with symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to capture precise pronunciation. The same orthographic symbol can have different lydkarakter in different languages, or even in different contexts within a language (allophones).

Lydkarakter is relevant in language teaching, lexicography, and speech technology. In dictionaries and pronunciation guides, writers indicate the lydkarakter to help users pronounce words correctly. In speech synthesis and recognition, mapping from orthography to lydkarakter is essential for natural-sounding output and accurate recognition.

Examples of variability include cross-dialect differences where a letter or digraph represents a different sound. The concept emphasizes that written form does not always reflect the exact spoken sound, and it depends on phonological context, dialect, and language.

Related concepts include phoneme, allophone, phonetics, and orthography.