Phonetics

The study of the sounds of language is called phonetics. If you were suddenly placed in a situation in which you could not understand what was being said, the first you would do is try to recognize the sounds people were making.

The important or critical sounds of a language are called phonemes.

The study of phonemes also includes such factors as stress or accent, and pitch and tone. One of the reasons that we have so much trouble pronouncing foreign words is that they include phonemes that are not part of our own language.

One way we can tell the phonemes or important sounds in a language from ones that are not is by recognizing minimal pairs.

This is a way of separating those sounds that change meaning from those that do not. For instance, you can recognize where certain people come from by the way they speak English.

Some people have what we call a British accent and they sound different form people raised in New England, New York City or Georgia. Yet even though they sound different we can still understand what they say because their use of sounds does not change the meaning of their words.

The use of minimal pairs allows us to see what range of sounds can be used in a word without changing its meaning.
Phonetics