Pronunciations

Linguistics is the science that deals with describing the structure and the application of language. Phonetics is one subdiscipline of linguistics. It examines and describes the sound aspects of language.

What is a phoneme?

A language consists of several different sounds, which are called phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit of a language that distinguishes the meaning of words. You can point out phonemes by building "minimal pairs": Look for two words that are pronounced differently just because of one sound. For example: bad and dad.

In those two words only the initial sounds /b/ and /d/ are different yet the two words mean something different. This indicates that the sounds /b/ and /d/ distinguish the meaning and can therefore be called phonemes.

Western European languages consist of about 40 different phonemes. Each language has different phonemes. Not only the written form—the orthography—of languages is different but also the sound of the languages. For example, French uses many of nasalized vowels like /a~/ in vent, not found in other languages. Other examples are the German /C/ in Küche or the Dutch /x/ in Gulden.

This explains why most people have accents when they speak a foreign language: They have difficulty pronouncing some phonemes correctly because these phonemes are not used in their native language.

Vowels and consonants

Phonemes can be divided into vowels and consonants. Vowels can be explained as phonemes that carry a syllable, whereas consonants are the "surrounding noise."

"Producing speech" is linguistically described by the term articulation. For transcription purposes it is useful to have some knowledge of the articulation. While vowels are articulated mainly in the mouth cavity, consonants are articulated all over the throat, nose, and mouth region.

Co-articulation

Co-articulation is the retention of a phonetic feature that was present in a preceding sound, or the anticipation of a feature that will be needed for a following sound. Co-articulation is not a relevant feature for pronunciation transcriptions.

Assimilation

Assimilation is a type of co-articulation. It is a feature where the speech sound becomes similar to its neighbors. In contrast to co-articulation, assimilation does have an effect on transcription. In each language supplement, examples are given which describe how and where assimilation takes place.