English Phonology

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.