Phonetics

Definition and usage in English language

Phonetics and its origin

Derived from a Greek word meaning sound or voice.
It is a branch of linguistics that comprises the sound of words and
their production.
Phonetics is divided into three parts.
We will also learn about the difference between mother tongue
and foreign language.

 Types of Phonetics:
Articulatory
Acoustic
Auditory

Native language or mother tongue

One of the more widely accepted definitions of native speakers is that they were
born in a particular country raised to speak the language of that country during the
critical period of their development,[3] The person qualifies as a "native speaker"
of a language by being born and immersed in the language during youth, in a
family in which the adults shared a similar language experience as the child.[4]
Native speakers are considered to be an authority on their given language
because of their natural acquisition process regarding the language, as opposed
to having learned the language later in life. That is achieved by personal
interaction with the language and speakers of the language. Native speakers will
not necessarily be knowledgeable about every grammatical rule of the language,
but they will have good "intuition" of the rules through their experience with the
language.[4]

Foreign language
A foreign language is a language indigenous to another country.
It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person
referred to, i.e., an English speaker living in Guam can say that
Chamorro is a foreign language to him or her.
These two characterizations do not exhaust the possible definitions,
however, and the label is occasionally applied in ways that are
variously misleading or factually inaccurate.

What is intonation?
In linguistics, intonation is variation of spoken pitch that is not used to
distinguish words; instead it is used for a range of functions such as
indicating the attitudes and emotions of the speaker, signalling the
difference between statements and questions, and between different types
of questions, focusing attention on important elements of the spoken
message and also helping to regulate conversational interaction.
It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation in some languages
distinguishes words, either lexically or grammatically. (The term tone is used
by some British writers in their descriptions of intonation but to refer to the
pitch movement found on the nucleus or tonic syllable in an intonation unit:
see Intonation in English: British Analyses of English Intonation, below).

What is stress in phonetics?

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables
in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. Stress is typically signaled
by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the
vowel, and changes in pitch.
The stress placed on words within sentences is calledsentence
stressorprosodic stress. This is one of the three components ofprosody, along
withrhythmandintonation. It includesphrasal stress(the default emphasis of
certain words withinphrasesor clauses), andcontrastive stress(used to
highlight an item a word, or occasionally just part of a word that is given
particular focus).

What is a syllable?
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech
sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables:
wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus
(most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically,
consonants).
Examples: Eve-ning.
Beau-ti-ful.
Ex-pe-ri-ment

Consonant sounds
A consonant is a speech sound that is not a vowel. It also refers to
letters of the alphabet that represent those sounds: Z, B, T, G, and
H are all consonants.
Consonants are all the non-vowel sounds, or their corresponding
letters: A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y are not consonants. In hat,
H and T are consonants.

Conclusion
Studying phonetics involves not only learning theoretical material but
also undergoing training in the production and perception of speech
sounds.
The latter is often known asear-training. Students must learn control
ofarticulatory variablesand develop their ability to recognize fine
differences between different vowels and consonants.[13][14]As part
of the training, they must become expert in using phonetic symbols,
usually those of theInternational Phonetic Alphabet.