PHONOLOGY

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

Phonetics relates to the sounds of language, while phonology studies how those sounds are put together to create meaning. Phonemes, or units of sound that are used in all languages to create words, are the focus of the study of phonetics.

 Phonology studies the rules in any given language that govern how those phonemes are combined to create meaningful words. Phonetics and phonology study two different aspects of sound, but the concepts are dependent on each other in the creation of language.

Each unit of sound, regardless of language, is called a phoneme. Phonetics attempts to understand how each one of these phonemes is physically formed and produced by humans. These units can be categorized by how they are produced and whether they are voiced or voiceless. This aspect of phonetics is commonly used by linguists as well as speech specialists to understand how humans create speech sounds and why speech problems sometimes occur.

The phonetic alphabet is a collection of symbols meant to represent the actual sound of each phoneme as it is pronounced in different situations. For example, a consonant may have two different symbols because it has two different ways of being pronounced depending on the word it is used in. These phonetic symbols are commonly found in dictionaries as a guide to how to correctly pronounce unfamiliar words. Each symbol can represent one letter or a group of letters that combine to make one sound.

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