Chapter 3: Phonetics

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Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi
eCampusOntario

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Learning Objectives

When you’ve completed this chapter, you’ll be able to:
Identify the locations and functions of parts of the human anatomy relevant to the articulation of spoken and signed languages,
Provide articulatory descriptions of given examples of phones and signs, and
Identify the meanings of many common symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

A key aspect of any language is its physical reality in the world: how we transmit linguistic signals from one person to another. This chapter explores this physical reality by looking at the body parts used for language, how they move to create a linguistic signal, and how linguists categorize, describe, and notate these physical properties so they can record and access information about a language.