fonetik

Fonetik is the branch of linguistics that studies the physical aspects of speech sounds, including their production, transmission, and perception. It seeks to describe how sounds are articulated by the vocal tract, how they propagate as acoustic signals, and how listeners perceive them. Phonetics is distinct from phonology, which studies the abstract systems and patterns of sounds within a language; phonetics provides the empirical data that phonology uses.

There are three main subfields: articulatory phonetics, which analyzes how speech sounds are produced by the movement and configuration of the tongue, lips, velum, glottis, and other articulators; acoustic phonetics, which analyzes the physical properties of speech signals such as frequency, amplitude, and spectral shape; and auditory phonetics, which studies how the ear and auditory nervous system perceive sounds.

Researchers use methods such as articulatory measurements, spectrographic analysis, and transcriptions using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Techniques include palatography, electropalatography, ultrasound, and MRI to visualize vocal tract configurations.

Applications of fonetik include speech synthesis and recognition, language teaching and documentation, forensic linguistics, clinical speech-language pathology, and audiology. Fieldwork often involves recording and analyzing speech from speakers of different languages to describe universal and language-specific phonetic patterns.

See also: International Phonetic Alphabet, forensic phonetics, acoustic phonetics, articulatory phonetics.