The Anthropology of Language: An
Introduction to Linguistic
Anthropology
Chapter 3
The Sounds of Language
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The Sounds of Language
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Phonology, Phonetics & Phonemics
Producing and writing speech sounds
Consonants, vowels & sound charts
Phonemic analysis
Etics and Emics
Applications
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Phonetics
• Acoustic
– Physical properties of sound, sound waves,
• Auditory
– Perception of sounds, psychological “reality”
• Articulatory
– Pronunciation of sounds, articulation
– Also known as descriptive phonetics
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Producing Speech Sounds
• lungs
• larynx &
vocal
cords
– voicing
• oral &
nasal
cavities
• velum
(soft palate)
mouth closed: [m, n]
mouth open = [õ]
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Phones:
The sounds of language
• Language sound can be described in terms of
the way that the sound is produced.
• The most efficient way to do this is by
describing each sound in terms of its place
and manner of articulation.
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Describing and transcribing
• Place and manner of articulation
– How can we think about place of articulation?
– How can we think about manner of articulation?
• The impact of categories/the usefulness of
categories
– We need uniform categories in order to do the sort of
analysis which is central to Western science.
– Those categories, like all linguistic categories, will
shape our perception.
– Sometimes, the categories can expand or improve
your perception.
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Consonants: Place
• From front to back:
bilabial [p, b, m]
labiodental [f, v]
(inter)dental [, ]
alveolar [t, d, s, z, n, l, ]
alveopalatal (palatal-alveolar; postalveolar)
[ , , ñ]
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Consonants: Place (continued)
Front to back
retroflex
[,  ]
velar [k, g, x, , ]
uvular [ ] (French ‘r’)
pharyngeal [ (Arabic ‘ain’)]
glottal [ , h]
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Consonants: Manner
• Stops (plosives) [t, d], [!, ]
• Aspirated: [th, dh]
• Fricatives [s, z]
• Affricates [ʧ, ʤ]
• Taps & Trills
– Taps / flaps [ ]
– Trills [ r ]
• Nasals [ n ]
• Approximants [ l, , j, w ]
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A Word About Approximants
• Sometimes called liquids & glides
• Variously charted in different systems
• IPA calls them approximants [ w, j,  ]
– And lateral approximants [ l ]
• Pike calls some of them frictionless laterals [ l ]
– He calls some of them semivowels [w, y]
– And he calls some of them vowels [ r ]
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Consonants: Review
Different languages may use different sounds
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Creating a Language: Consonants
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•
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•
•
Your language will need some consonants
Begin by choosing 8 to 12 consonants to use
These can be as complex as you wish
Be sure you can pronounce each one
Use phonetic symbols (use the I.P.A.)
– do not use English spellings
• Put your consonant symbols into chart form
– Use the workbook charts as models
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Phonetic Charting
• Mapping the sounds of a language
– Helps you to analyze and pronounce sounds
– Helps you to analyze sound systems
• And to see patterns
– Guides you in understanding accents
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Charting and Sounds
• Shinzwani [  ]
– voiceless
– retroflex
– stop
• Czech [ ř ]
– voiced
– alveolar
– fricative
– AND trill
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Charting and Sound Systems
• Making predictions
• Shinzwani
–p
t

–b
d
??? ???
–
–
s
x

???
k
x
???
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Charting and Accents: 1
• How would you pronounce Shinzwani [ona]?
– Why did you make the choice you made?
• Place?
• Manner?
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In-class review of practice with
languages
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Practice with languages (cont.)
• Explain, in phonetic terms, why you made the
choices that you made for the charts.
• Use the sound charts and give a phonetic
explanation for why the Maori, Luangiuan,
and Rarotongan children did not say [θæŋk
yu].
• Use the sound charts to explain why the Maori
child said [fæŋk yu] and not [tæŋk yu].
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Vowels: Place
• part of tongue raised
i
u
e
o
– front, center, back
• height of tongue
– high, mid, low
a
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Vowels: Manner
• rounded
[u, o] - back (e.g., most English back vowels)
[y, ø] - front (e.g., French, German, Danish)
• unrounded
[ i, e] - front (e.g., all English front vowels)
[ ,  ] - back (e.g., Turkish, Native American
languages)
• tense/lax (close/open)
– [i] vs [I]
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Charting Vowels
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Diphthongs
to front
[ii] seen
[ai] sign
[ i] boid
to back
to center
[i] beer
[e] bear
[a] bar
[ ] bore
[uu] sue
[ou] hoe
[au] how
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Change over time – vowels in
American English
• Mary, merry, marry
• Older form: /meri/, /mεri/, /mæri/
• Shift moves all to /mεri/
• Makes possible bad jokes:
– Why is Joe wearing a dress?
– Sometimes he just likes to eat, drink, and be Mary.
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Creating a Language: Vowels
• Your language will also need some vowels
• Choose between 4 and 6 vowels to use
– Be sure you can pronounce them
• These should be simple vowels
– Although you can use them to make diphthongs
• Use phonetic symbols (use the I.P.A.)
– Do not use English spellings
• Put your vowel symbols into chart form
– Use the workbook charts as models
• Diphthongs should go on a separate chart
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Suprasegmental features
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Suprasegmentals
• Additional pronunciation
– [o] as segment
• Marked with diacritics
– [  ] as suprasegmental (nasalization)
• [o] = nasalized segment
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Phones and Phonemes
• Phone
– Smallest identifiable unit of sound in a
language
– More easily identified by outsiders
• Phoneme
– Smallest contrastive unit of sound in a
language
– Heard as a single sound by insiders
– Contrasts are not predictable
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Phonology
• Sounds and their arrangements
– Phonetics & Phonemics
• Phonetics:
– identify & describe sounds in detail (phones)
• Phonemics
– analyze arrangements of sounds
– identify groupings of sounds (phonemes)
• Examples:
– English “pill” vs “spill -- [ph] + [p] = /p/
– Hindi “ph l” (fruit) vs “p l” (minute) -- [ph] + [p] = /ph / + /p/ .
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Phonemes
• Defined by difference
• Belonging to a particular language
• Sounds which affect meaning
– “minimal pairs” are used to determine if
two sounds are different phonemes
• We use / / to indicate a phoneme, while [ ]
indicates a phone
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–
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[b] and [bh] both /b/ in English,
but in Thai they are /b/ and /bh/
A minimal pair which supports this claim is
[ba] – to be crazy, mad, insane and;
[bha]– elder sister of my parent, Auntie
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Identifying Phonemes
• Minimal pairs
– reveal contrasts in sounds
• ‘pin’ ‘tin’ ‘kin’ ‘bin’ ‘din’ ‘gin’
• Examples for practice (W/R p. 52)
– 3.2a Shinzwani
– 3.2b Hindi
– 3.2c Czech
– 3.2d French
– 3.2e Chatino
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Variations
• A phoneme can be a single sound/phone
• Or it can be a group of sounds/phones
– Members of a group are usually similar
• They are close on the phonetic chart
• They sound like ‘variations’ of one another
– Members of a group are non-contrastive
• They don’t mark differences in meaning
– When such variations exist, they are called:
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Allophones
• Sounds which differ according to rules of
complimentary distribution, and which are
therefore NOT phonemes but instead aspects of
the same phoneme.
• Are heard as the same sound by speakers of the
language.
• Allophones are about position and relationship –
where in a word does the sound occur, and what
other sounds are before and after it.
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Allophones (cont.)
• The rules for the production of sound in relationship
are powerful.
– In English, [ŋ] cannot occur in word-initial position, while in Thai and
Lahu it often does
• Because the variation is usually ‘conditioned’ by
neighboring sounds, we can also call this
‘conditioned variation.’
• [p] and [ph] are allophones of /p/ in English
• Complimentary distribution is evident when you have a clear
difference but CANNOT come up with minimal pairs.
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Allophones From American English
• An allophone of a plosive may be created by
aspiration, lack of aspiration, or being unrealized in
certain positions.
• An allophone of a vowel may be created by nasalizing
it before nasal consonant (compare sand/sad,
tend/ted)
• Vowels from the front and back of the mouth may
move toward the middle in rapid speech (you can
make this into a context rule in your language)
• [n] in English becomes dental [ ̺n] when it comes
before a dental fricative (tenth, month)
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Some allophones from Lahu
• Bilabials are affricated before /u/
– [p, ph, b, m] – [pf, phf, bv, mv]
– So you can say /pe/ but not /pu/, it becomes
/pfu/, and you can’t say /mu/, so it becomes
/mvu/
• /n/ becomes palatal before /i/
– So you can have /nu/, but you don’t find /ni/,
instead you find /nʲi/
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Writing the rules – Lahu /n/
• Descriptive statement:
– /n/ has allophones [n, nʲ]
• [n] in all cases except
• [nʲ] before [i]
• Rule:
– /n/
• --- [nʲ] #____ [i]
• --- [n] #_____all V except [i]
– Note: Lahu words are generally one syllable, CV format
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Some allophones in Pirahã
(10-13 phonemes)
• /b/ [b, ʙ, m]: the nasal [m] after a pause, the
trill [ʙ] before /o/.
• /g/ [g, n, ɺɺ̼͡ ]: the nasal [n] after a pause, the
͡ lateral alveolar-lingualabial double-flap
[ɺɺ]
only in special types of speech
• Vowels are nasalized after the glottal
consonants /h/ and /ʔ/
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Making your allophones
• Vowels may be nasalized, or even change to
other positions in the mouth.
• Consonants may take on additional sound
qualities, or they may change to different
consonants entirely.
• Rules may involve position in word or
relationship between phones. You might want
to have one of each type of rule.
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Allophone Conditioning
• is usually:
– patterned
– predictable
– discoverable
– describable
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Practice with Allophones:
English /t/
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•
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See W/R p. 49
[t ] (aspirated) [t  k]
[t] (unaspirated) [s t  k ]
[t ] (unreleased) [k  t ]
/t/
[t ] / #___
[t ] / s___
[t ] / ___#
What about ‘p’ and ‘k’ in English? (See W/R p. 50 (3.3a English))
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More Practice with Allophones
• See pages 51–45 in Workbook/Reader
– 3.3b KiSwahili
– 3.3c German
– 3.3d Korean
– 3.3e Japanese
– 3.3f English
– 3.3g isiZulu
– 3.3h Totonac
– 3.3i Farsi
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Phonemes vs. Allophones: Review
• allophones
– non-contrastive
– predictable distribution
• [p n] and [spn]
• phonemes
– contrastive
– non-predictable distribution
• [p n] vs [t n]
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Etics vs. Emics
• Ken Pike, 1950s
• A core concept in anthropology
• Etics
– Outside, cross-cultural /comparative
– Absolute, objective
– A step to emic analysis
• Emics
– Inside, culture-specific
– Relative, subjective
– A goal of emic analysis
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Using Phonetics & Phonemics
• Working with your conversation partners:
– Map phonemic contrasts
– Compare phonological systems
– Use your understanding of phonemes & allophones
to assist with accent reduction (or to pronounce
your CP’s language better)
• See Workbook/Reader p. 66
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Using Phonetics & Phonemics
• Creating your language:
– Assume each of your sounds is a phoneme
– Now create a pair of allophones for one phoneme:
• Choose one phoneme and create a variant
– OR
• Convert two phonemes into allophones of one
– Your allophones should resemble each other
• e.g., same manner or place of production
– Create a rule to describe the distribution of the two
allophones
• Beginning vs. end of a word?
• Following certain sounds?
• Preceding certain sounds?
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Doing Phonological Research
• Descriptive vs. prescriptive approaches
– Transcription vs. spelling
• Avoid using your own categories
– Find out how the system operates on its own
terms
• Describe the patterns you find
– Identify the units
– Identify relationships between the units.
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Beyond Phonology: Prosody
• Sounds that “accompany” speech, but
aren’t words themselves
– Paralanguage—coined by George Trager
(1950s)
– Voice qualities
• Loudness, tone of voice
• Pitch, speed, rhythm
• Vocal modifications:
– whispering, cooing, breathy voice, rising intonation
– Vocal segregates (or vocal gestures)
• Stand on their own
– uh-huh, mhmm, shhhh, throat-clearing
– Ideophones?
• Bam, pow, slurp!
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Next:
• Words and Sentences
– Read:
• Textbook Chapter 4
• Workbook/Reader:
– Adams (p. 67)
– Prepare to do:
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Writing/Discussion Exercises (W/R pp. 61–62)
Practice with Languages (pp. 63–82)
Language Creating (p. 85)
Conversation Partnering (p. 86).
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Lagniappe:
Distinctive Features
• Another way to describe phonemes
– Phonemes as ‘bundles of features’
– Binary nature of features
• +/- voice
– Focus on features rather than phones
• Place of production
– anterior
– coronal
• Manner of production
– consonantal
– obstruent
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More Lagniappe:
Comparative Phonology
• How many phonemes in a language?
– From a few dozen to 100+
– Average figures:
• Vowels: 8.7
– English has 14
• Consonants: 22.8
– English has 24
• Your conversation partner’s language?
• The language you are creating?
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