# Phonetics **Domain:** Linguistics / Speech **Doc Type:** Field Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Phonetics** is the study of speech sounds: how they are produced by the mouth and throat, how they travel as sound, and how they are heard. Its sister field, phonology, studies how each language organizes those sounds into **phonemes**, the units that distinguish one word from another, as /p/ and /b/ separate *pat* from *bat*. The International Phonetic Association, founded in 1886, created the International Phonetic Alphabet so that any spoken sound can be written precisely. ## Corpus Context Phonetics is the working ground of [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]]: sounding a word out, noticing which sounds sit near one another in the mouth, and following those neighbors to related words. ## Relationships - **Related fields:** [[wiki/Phonological Representation|Phonological Representation]] · [[wiki/Morphology|Morphology]] · [[wiki/Linguistics|Linguistics]]. - **Sound and meaning:** [[wiki/Phonosemantics|Phonosemantics]]. - **Practice:** [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]]. - **Corpus project:** [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]], Bryant McGill's symbolic language engine, built from 1994 into the mid-2000s, with its phonological engine, sound indexes, and lexical knowledge graph. ## Sources - International Phonetic Association, *Handbook of the International Phonetic Association* (Cambridge University Press, 1999). ## See Also [[wiki/Sound Change|Sound Change]] · [[wiki/Ablaut|Ablaut]]