Most human languages are transmitted by sounds and one of the most obvious differences between languages is that they sound di

Phonetics

Most languages are transmitted by sounds and one of the most obvious differences 
between languages is that they sound different. The study of the sounds that human 
beings make in their languages is known as phonetics. While, sign languages, such as 
BSL and ASL, are clearly not transmitted by sound, there are units in sign languages 
which correspond phonetics and phonology, but these will not be discussed here 
(other areas of language description apply equally to spoken and sign languages). 
Transcribing sounds 
We are used to the idea of representing language in writing, however, conventional 
writing systems are not adequate to represent sounds. We need only consider the 
problems inherent in English spellings such as cough, dough and through or the 
different pronunciations of words in US and UK English to see the problems involved 
in using conventional spellings to represent sounds: the sounds of a language are not 
the same as the letters of a language even in languages with much less irregularity 
than English. To overcome the deficiencies of conventional spellings, linguists use a 
phonetic alphabet such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent 
sounds. IPA has over 100 symbols each representing different possible sounds. 
Phonetic transcriptions are usually written between square brackets. 
In transcribing language we can use either a narrow transcription or a broad 
transcription. A narrow transcription contains as much information as possible and 
records very minor differences between sounds, while a broad transcription contains 
less information and records only some differences between sounds. For example, a 
broad transcription of the word pea might capture the fact that it has two main sounds 

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4 
[

], a narrower transcription might show that the consonant is actually unvoiced and 
aspirated and the vowel is long [

]. A very narrow transcription might include 
features of voice quality. Narrow transcriptions are very important in areas such as 
speech pathology or forensic phonetics where minor differences between sounds are 
important, but in most cases broad transcriptions are adequate for describing 
languages.