Speech is the most important medium through which we convey our ideas, emotions and identity. To an untrained ear, languages can often sound very different from each other: Vietnamese from English, for example, or Arabic from Zulu.  But the speech sounds of the world's languages do not vary without limit and are in fact built up according to fairly simple structural principles. Speech sounds are studied in the discipline of Phonetics. This course is both a theoretical and practical course in Phonetics. It teaches you about human speech sounds: how they are made by the human vocal tract; how they are transmitted acoustically; and how the speech acoustics are perceived. The course also has a strong practical focus: to show how one discovers the sounds of an unknown language from scratch.  In order to do this, students learn how to produce and transcribe a large number of the speech sounds of the world's languages, including all the exotica of clicks, ejectives, implosives, tones and much more. You will also learn how to quantify some important speech acoustics with a computer. Finally, one very important applied aspect of phonetics is explained - Forensic Speaker Identification - together with the proper way of evaluating forensic evidence. A course website is used which includes unique materials designed by the lecturer to develop students' transcriptional and analytical skills. The lecturer is an acknowledged expert on the phonetics of Tone Languages, and also one of the world's leading forensic speech scientists.

Depending on how well students satisfy the requirements of the course, they will be able to do one or more of the following, with greater or lesser expertise:

1. Transcribe a wide range of speech sounds from the languages of the world using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

2. Produce a wide range of speech sounds from the world's languages.

3. Describe speech sounds with the correct professional terminology.

4. Properly record, digitally acquire and edit speech from an informant.

5. Work with a native speaker to discover the speech sounds and sound system of nearly any of the world's languages from scratch.

6. Quantify vowels and tones acoustically with professional speech analysis software.

7. Know the logically correct way of evaluating the strength of evidence in support of a hypotheses; and how to estimate the probability of a hypothesis, given the evidence adduced in its support.

8. Undertake guided research on a topic in Phonetics or Applied Phonetics.

Transcription assignments (30%), Transcription test (20%), Major fieldwork Project (30%), 20 words initial field-work transcription (12%), Acoustics analysis (8%)

Students must pass the transcription test in order to pass the course.  

2 hours of lectures and one hour of tutorial per week

None but students are advised to take Introduction to the Study of Language LING1001/LING2001 first.

LING2010 Phonetics: Sounds of the World's Languages and LING1004/LING2004 Phonetics and Phonology

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Chapters 22-30

This course or its predecessor LING1004/LING2004 is required for honours in Linguistics.