Sounds of the World's Languages: Phonetics and Phonology

The spoken languages of the world show fascinating diversity in the types of speech sounds that are used and the ways these are organised to encode meaning. We investigate the range of sounds used in the world's languages, including Indigenous languages of Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. This course will provide you with skills in two core subdisciplines of linguistics: Phonetics, how sounds are produced by the human vocal tract, transmitted acoustically, and perceived by listeners, and Phonology, the ways speech sounds are systematically organised within and across languages. You will receive comprehensive practical training in how to articulate and perceive different speech sounds and transcribe them using the International Phonetic Alphabet, and learn about relevant aspects of anatomy, physics and cognition. You will also develop skills in computer aided phonetic analysis using open source software, and methods of data collection for phonetic and phonological research. You will gain extensive experience in critically applying principles of phonological analysis to describe and represent distinctions and distributional patterns in the sound systems of different languages, and undertake in-depth research on a specific language. This course will provide you with a foundation for studies in fields such as forensic linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic typology, language acquisition, and speech pathology.