"Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs."
The study of how speech sounds are organized and used in language, including differences between languages and dialects.
Articulatory Phonetics: The study of how speech sounds are produced by the articulation and movements of the vocal organs.
Acoustic Phonetics: The study of the physical properties of speech sounds, including sound waves and frequencies.
Auditory Phonetics: The study of how speech sounds are perceived and recognized by the human auditory system.
Phonemes: The smallest unit of sound in a language that can change the meaning of a word.
Allophones: Variant pronunciations of a phoneme that do not change the meaning of a word.
Phonemic Analysis: The process of identifying the phonemes of a language and determining their inventory.
Minimal Pairs: Pairs of words in a language that differ by only one phoneme.
Phonetic Transcription: The process of representing speech sounds using a phonetic alphabet or system.
Suprasegmentals: Features of speech that go beyond individual sounds, such as stress, tone, and intonation.
Prosody: The patterns of stress, intonation, and rhythm in speech that convey meaning and emotion.
Phonological Processes: The regular patterns of sound changes that occur in a language, such as assimilation, deletion, and insertion.
Syllables: The basic units of sound in a word that contain a vowel sound.
Phonotactics: The rules that govern the permissible combinations of sounds within syllables and words in a language.
Natural Classes: Groups of sounds that share certain phonetic features and behave similarly in phonological rules.
Generative Phonology: A theory of phonology that proposes a set of abstract underlying representations from which surface sounds are derived.
articulatory phonetics: Study of the production and classification of speech sounds.
acoustic phonetics: Study of the physical properties of speech sound waves.
auditory phonetics: Study of the perception and processing of speech sounds by human listeners.
clinical phonetics: Study of speech production and perception disorders, and their diagnosis and treatment.
experimental phonetics: Study of speech sounds through experimentation and measurement.
historical phonetics: Study of changes in speech sounds over time and their historical origins.
comparative phonetics: Study of similarities and differences between speech sounds across different languages.
functional phonetics: Study of the function and purpose of speech sounds in communication.
grammatical phonology: Study of the role of speech sounds in language grammar and syntax.
"The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety."
"At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages."
"But may now relate to any linguistic analysis either."
"Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages."
"The building blocks of signs are specifications for movement, location, and handshape."
"At first, a separate terminology was used for the study of sign phonology ('chereme' instead of 'phoneme', etc.)."
"But the concepts are now considered to apply universally to all human languages."