An overview

We begins by taking an overview of the mouth, nose and throat, where we cover the main details of the production of speech. We introduce a lot of essential terminology there, and get a broad picture of the sounds of English. Next, we take a look at ways of representing sound on paper: a difficult problem, since the material for our study is grounded in time, ephemeral and short-lived, whereas the printed word is static and long-lasting. We cover aspects of phonetic transcription and take a simplified look at acoustic representations. After this, we look at the larynx and matters of breathing, pitch and voice quality.

Next comes a series of subjects on the main kinds of sound in English, beginning with vowels. We start with vowels because they are a fundamental building block of speech, and in English many consonants take on properties of their adjacent vowels. After vowels, we move through the main consonant types in English: approximants, plosives, fricatives and nasals. Finally, we look at some less common sounds where the air is moved into or out of the vocal tract by some other mechanism than the lungs.

By the end, you should have some understanding of ways to represent spoken English. You should understand something about the way sounds are made in the vocal tract, and something of the complexity and detail of spoken English. Most importantly of all, by the end, you should have some skills for making some phonetic observations of your own.