LING 2040 - Phonology

Almost all of us use spoken language everyday. We express ourselves through speech in a multitude of ways. Pronunciation immediately identifies each of us as belonging to a certain ethnic group, social class, locality, age group and gender. This course investigates the nature of speech sounds, the mechanisms of speech production and perception and the ways by which these sounds are classified into a fixed inventory of meaningful sounds, the phoneme inventory, by speakers of a language. Students will learn how to transcribe speech sounds using phonetic symbols (International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA). Students will compare and contrast the sound systems of a variety of languages. A particular focus of this course will be developing understandings of the relationship between speech and writing in a range of languages, including English. This course is essential for all linguistics students, language teachers (English or otherwise) and newsreaders. The course will also be of interest to many students of psychology, anthropology and social inquiry.