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Although our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinkinghuman’, it has often been suggested that an even more appropriate namewould be Homo loquens, or ‘speaking human’. Many species have soundbasedsignalling systems, and can communicate with other members ofthe same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approachingdanger or where the next meal is coming from. Most humans (leavingaside for now native users of sign languages) also use sounds for linguisticsignalling; but the structure of the human vocal organs allows a particularlywide range of sounds to be used, and they are also put togetherin an extraordinarily sophisticated way. There are two subdisciplines in linguistics which deal with sound,namely phonetics and phonology, and to fulfil the aim of this book,which is to provide an outline of the sounds of various English accentsand how those sounds combine and pattern together, we will needaspects of both. Phonetics provides objective ways of describing andanalysing the range of sounds humans use in their languages. Morespecifically, articulatory phonetics identifies precisely which speechorgans and muscles are involved in producing the different sounds of theworld’s languages. Those sounds are then transmitted from the speakerto the hearer, and acoustic and auditory phonetics focus on the physicsof speech as it travels through the air in the form of sound waves, and theeffect those waves have on a hearer’s ears and brain. It follows thatphonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology, physics andneurology.
However, although knowing what sounds we can in principle makeand use is part of understanding what makes us human, each persongrows up learning and speaking only a particular human language orlanguages, and each language only makes use of a subset of the full rangeof possible, producible and distinguishable sounds. When we turn to the characteristics of the English sound system that make it specificallyEnglish, and different from French or Welsh or Quechua, we move intothe domain of phonology, which is the language-specific selection andorganisation of sounds to signal meanings. Phonologists are interested inthe sound patterns of particular languages, and in what speakers andhearers need to know, and children need to learn, to be speakers of thoselanguages: in that sense, it is close to psychology. Our phonological knowledge is not something we can necessarilyaccess and talk about in detail: we often have intuitions about languagewithout knowing where they come from, or exactly how to express them.But the knowledge is certainly there. For instance, speakers of Englishwill tend to agree that the word snil is a possible but non-existent word,whereas *fnil is not possible (as the asterisk conventionally shows). In theusual linguistic terms, snil is an accidental gap in the vocabulary, while*fnil is a systematic gap, which results from the rules of the English soundsystem. However, English speakers are not consciously aware of thoserules, and are highly unlikely to tell a linguist asking about those wordsthat the absence of *fnil reflects the unacceptability of word-initialconsonant sequences, or clusters, with [fn-] in English: the more likelyanswer is that snil ‘sounds all right’ (and if you’re lucky, your informantwill produce similar words like sniff or snip to back up her argument), butthat *fnil ‘just sounds wrong’. It is the job of the phonologist to expressgeneralisations of this sort in precise terms: after all, just because knowledgeis not conscious, this does not mean it is unreal, unimportant or notworth understanding. When you run downstairs, you don’t consciouslythink ‘left gluteus maximus, left foot, right arm; right gluteus maximus,right foot, left arm’ on each pair of steps. In fact, you’re unlikely to makeany conscious decisions at all, below the level of wanting to go downstairsin the first place; and relatively few people will know the names ofthe muscles involved. In fact, becoming consciously aware of the individualactivities involved is quite likely to disrupt the overall process:think about what you’re doing, and you finish the descent nose-first. Allof this is very reminiscent of our everyday use of spoken language. Wedecide to speak, and what about, but the nuts and bolts of speech productionare beyond our conscious reach; and thinking deliberately aboutwhat we are saying, and how we are saying it, is likely to cause selfconsciousnessand hesitation, interrupting the flow of fluent speechrather than improving matters. Both language and mobility (crawling,walking, running downstairs) emerge in developing children by similarcombinations of mental and physical maturation, internal abilities, andinput from the outside world. As we go along, what we have learnedbecomes easy, fluent and automatic; we only become dimly aware of what complexity lies behind our actions when we realise we have madea speech error, or see and hear a child struggling to say a word or takea step. Phonologists, like anatomists and physiologists, aim to help usunderstand the nature of that underlying complexity, and to describefully and formally what we know in a particular domain, but don’t knowwe know. The relationship between phonetics and phonology is a complexone, but we might initially approach phonology as narrowed-downphonetics. Quite small babies, in the babbling phase, produce the wholerange of possible human sounds, including some which they never hearfrom parents or siblings: a baby in an English-speaking environment willspontaneously make consonants which are not found in any Europeanlanguage, but are to be found closest to home in an African language, say,or one from the Caucasus. However, that child will then narrow downher range of sounds from the full human complement to only thosefound in the language(s) she is hearing and learning, and will claim,when later trying to learn at school another language with a differentsound inventory, that she cannot possibly produce unfamiliar soundsshe made perfectly naturally when only a few months old. Or within alanguage, subtle mechanical analysis of speech reveals that every utteranceof the same word, even by the same speaker, will be a tiny fractiondifferent from every other; yet hearers who share that language willeffortlessly identify the same word in each case. In this sense, phoneticssupplies an embarrassment of riches, providing much more informationthan speakers seem to use or need: all those speakers, and every utterancedifferent! Phonology, on the other hand, involves a reduction to theessential information, to what speakers and hearers think they are sayingand hearing. The perspective shifts from more units to fewer, from hugevariety to relative invariance, from absolutely concrete to relativelyabstract; like comparing the particular rose I can see from my window,or roses generally in all their variety (old-fashioned, bushy, briar;scented or not; red, yellow, shocking pink), to The Rose, an almost idealand abstract category to which we can assign the many different actualvariants. A white dog-rose, a huge overblown pink cabbage rose, and anew, genetically engineered variety can all be roses with no contradictioninvolved. In linguistic terms, it’s not just that I say tomahto and yousay tomayto; it’s that I say tomahto and tomahto and tomahto, and the threeutterances are subtly different, but we both think I said the same thingthree times.
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