PhonologieRepertoire

PhonologieRepertoire is a theoretical and practical construct in linguistics that denotes a catalog of the phonological resources of a language or language variety. It combines elements of phonology—the sound system and contrastive features—with repertoire, the set of sounds and processes used by a speech community. The term is used to describe both the static inventory of distinctive sounds and the dynamic rules that govern their distribution and realization.

A PhonologieRepertoire typically comprises: a phoneme inventory (consonants, vowels, tones where relevant), underlying feature representations, allophonic rules and environments, phonotactic constraints, permissible syllable shapes, and prosodic patterns such as stress and intonation. It may also include phonological processes such as assimilation, palatalization, or vowel harmony, as well as diachronic notes, dialectal variation, and data provenance. For computational use, the repertoire is often encoded in a structured format with metadata, standard phoneme inventories (IPA), and models of sound change, whether rule-based or statistical.

Applications include cross-linguistic typology, field linguistics and language documentation, speech technology, and language education. It supports comparing phonological systems, tracing historical developments, and informing automatic speech recognition or synthesis.

Limitations include incomplete data for many languages, variation across dialects, and the challenge of representing allophony and implicit processes. The concept emphasizes careful documentation, explicit transcription conventions, and transparent methodology to facilitate replication and reuse.