The phonology of English language


Phonology of  the English Language.

Phonology is the study of the way sounds function in languages, including phonemes, syllable structure, stress, accent, intonation, and which sounds are distinctive units within a language. Every human language is made up of sounds, a study of these sounds and how they are patterned for meaningful communication is what is termed Phonology.

The phonological system of the English Language also known as the sound system of the English Language is made of 44 phonemes(meaning distinguishing sounds). These phonemes-which are divided into vowels(20) and consonants (24)- form the elementary unit of spoken English.

For a better understanding of what phonemes  stand for, I will like to make a distinction between these concepts used in phonetics(the study of human speech sounds), the concepts to be distinguished are; phonemes , allophones and phones .

 A phoneme is the smallest contrastive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of meaning. For example 'mat/mæt/' and 'bat/bæt/'. It is clear here that the phonemes /b/ and /m/ are responsible for the semantic difference between the two words.Phonemes are based on spoken language and recorded by IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). They are written between slashes..e.g. /b/ and /m/


Allophones are variations of phonemes. So, they are set of possible spoken sounds used to pronounce one single phoneme. e.g. [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones of the phoneme /p/. They are written in brackets.
A phone is a unit of speech sound. It may refer to any speech sound or gesture without regard of its place in phonology of a language. A phoneme is a set of phones or a set of sound features that are thought of as the same element within the phonology of a particular language.

Below are  tables with the 44 sounds of the English Language

Image result for english consonant chart with examples

Image result for english vowel table with examples

Comments

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