1 The sounds: phonetics

1.1 Introduction

Speaking is such a normal and everyday process for us that most of the time we do not consciously think about what we are doing. Fortunately, you might say. Imagine you had to think carefully about every sound in every word in every sentence you want to produce. It could take hours to finish a single sentence. Luckily, there is no need for this: we have developed such efficient routines for speaking that most of the necessary actions do not require conscious thought. You could compare it to walking: once you have learned what to do, some sort of automatism takes over.

This works fine as long as we stick to our respective native language. The situation changes, however, when we start learning a new, foreign language. Not only are the words different, but in many cases the foreign language also has some sounds which are unfamiliar. German learners of English, for instance, very often have problems with the “lisping” sound in words such asbath,therapy, ormathematics (we use italics whenever we cite words as examples). There are no German words which include this type of sound. That does not mean, of course, that native speakers of German cannot achieve a correct pronunciation ofbath ortherapy, but before they can do so they have to learn how to produce the new sound. English learners of German, on the other hand, encounter the same problem with the vowel that appears in GermanMüsli ‘muesli’ andHüte ‘hats’ (we use single inverted commas to indicate the meanings of examples cited). This vowel is not part of the pool of sounds which English speakers use to construct the words of their language, the Englishsound inventory (we use bold print whenever we introduce an important new term).

There are some general conclusions we can draw from this. Firstly, languages may use only a subset of all possible speech sounds. In fact, there is no language which makes use of all of them. Secondly, languages differ in which sounds they include in their inventory: German uses a different selection than English does. Foreign language learners are thus bound to encounter sounds which do not occur in their native language and which they do not have routines for. They have to learn the gestures necessary to produce these unfamiliar sounds. In other words, learners have to find out which muscle movements in which combination and sequence are required for the production of the respective new sound.

There is an entire subdiscipline of linguistics,phonetics, which deals with these and other characteristics of speech sounds. It focuses on questions such as the following: What types of speech sounds do we find in the languages of the world and in individual languages? How can we describe these sounds? Which criteria can we use to distinguish different sounds?

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