Articles
In-depth guides on phonetics, IPA notation, and language sound systems.
Phonetics and Language Technology
The relationship between phonetics and computing is older than most people realise. The first speech synthesis systems in the 1930s were electrical circuits designed around acoustic models of the vocal tract—engineering phonetics. Modern vo...
Read article →The Rarest Phonemes in Human Language
Just as some words appear in nearly every language—terms for mother, water, and the sun—some phonemes appear in nearly every language too. A...
Read →How Children Learn the Sounds of Their Language
Long before children produce their first recognisable words, they are already engaged in sophisticated phonological learning. Infants as you...
Read →Lateral Consonants: Beyond the Letter L
When most people think of lateral consonants, they think of /l/—the liquid consonant in English, French, Spanish, and dozens of other famili...
Read →The Phonetic Richness of Sub-Saharan African Languages
Sub-Saharan Africa is the most linguistically diverse region on earth by almost any measure. It is home to four of the world's major languag...
Read →Pharyngeal Sounds in Arabic and Hebrew
The pharynx—the section of the throat between the larynx below and the velum above—is a place of articulation unused by most European langua...
Read →Aspiration: The Puff of Air That Changes Meaning
Aspiration is the brief rush of air that follows certain consonants before the vocal cords begin to vibrate for the following vowel. In Engl...
Read →Tone Languages vs. Pitch-Accent Languages
Pitch plays a role in the phonology of many languages, but not all pitch-using languages are tonal languages in the same sense. Linguists dr...
Read →The Austronesian Language Family: From Madagascar to Hawaii
The Austronesian language family holds a remarkable geographic record: it spans the widest area of any language family on earth, stretching...
Read →Bilabial vs. Labiodental: The Difference Between P and F
Two consonants that even beginning phonetics students can usually produce correctly illustrate one of the clearest distinctions in articulat...
Read →How Linguists Classify the World's Languages
With somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 living languages in the world—the count depends on how you draw the line between language and dialect...
Read →Languages with the Smallest Phoneme Inventories
If the languages at the top of the phoneme inventory rankings dazzle with their acoustic complexity, those at the bottom achieve communicati...
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