Phonology

A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (margins, which are most often consonants). In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language: its prosody or poetic metre. Properties such as stress, tone, and reduplication operate on syllables and their parts. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for exa

A phoneme () is a set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial–gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are studied under phonology, a branch of linguistics (a discipline encompassing language, writing, speech and related matters).

Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics) is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phonemes or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either:

the number and type of lines and syllables that a verse must have

in linguistics, relative emphasis given to a syllable or other speech element

thumb|A simplified procedure to determine whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes. The cases on the extreme left and the extreme right are those in which the sounds are allophones.|class=skin-invert-image

the rearranging of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence in linguistics

a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual

basic unit of sound in speech

metrical foot

thumb|220x124px | right | Occurrence of reduplication across world languages In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.

thumb|Supermarket aisle sign in Calgary, Canada, in 2025, showing apocope of -ed in etymological canned meat and canned vegetables but not in Mexican

part of linguistics concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments, but properties of syllables and larger units of speech

type of vowel sound

phonological unit

thumb|235px|Muṣḥaf al-tajwīd, an edition of the Qur'an|Quran printed with colored letters to facilitate tajwid.

In phonology, particularly within historical linguistics, dissimilation is a phenomenon whereby similar consonants or vowels in a word become less similar or elided. In English, dissimilation is particularly common with liquid consonants such as and when they occur in a sequence. The phenomenon is often credited to horror aequi, the principle that language users avoid repetition of identical linguistic structures.

In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced "firs' light" (). Many other terms are used to refer to specific cases where sounds are omitted.

In phonetics, nasalisation (or nasalization in American English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .

two words that differ in only one element of their pronunciation

In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the first syllable (prothesis), the last syllable (paragoge), or between two syllabic sounds in a word. The opposite process in which one or more sounds are removed is referred to as syncope or elision.

process of language change affecting pronunciation or sound system structure

In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition means 'softening' or 'weakening' (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a particular point in time) and diachronically (as a language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, to lose its place of articulation (a phenomenon called debuccalization, which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like or ), or even causing a consonant to disappear en

linguistic process whereby weak phonemes disappear from words

Phonaesthetics (also spelled phonesthetics in North America) is the study of the beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by during the mid-20th century and derives . Speech sounds have many aesthetic qualities, some of which are subjectively regarded as euphonious (pleasing) or cacophonous (displeasing). Phonaesthetics remains a budding and often subjective field of study, with no scientifically or otherwise formally established definition; today, it mostly exists as a marginal branch of psychology, p

Haplology (from Greek "simple" and , "speech") is, in spoken language, the elision (elimination or deletion) of an entire syllable or a part of it through dissimilation (a differentiating shift that affects two neighboring similar sounds). The phenomenon was identified by American philologist Maurice Bloomfield in the 20th century. Linguists sometimes jokingly refer to the phenomenon as "haplogy", an autology. As a general rule, haplology occurs in English adverbs of adjectives ending in "le", for example gentlely → gently; ablely → ably.

Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words.

class of lateral and rhotic sounds

group of consonants which have no intervening vowel

Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek and ) is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences by means of phonotactic constraints.

linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints

type of consonant change depending on context and surrounding words

Velarization or velarisation is a secondary articulation of consonants by which the back of the tongue is raised toward the velum during the articulation of the consonant. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, velarization is transcribed by one of four diacritics: A tilde or swung dash through the letter covers velarization, uvularization and pharyngealization, as in (the velarized equivalent of ) A superscript Latin gamma after the letter standing for the velarized consonant, as in (a velarized ) To distinguish velarization from a velar fricative release, may be used instead of , as in A s

the most basic unit of phonological structure that may be analyzed in phonological theory

distinction between two groups of Arabic consonants

A mondegreen () is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray", and mishearing the words "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen".

in phonology, changes in the acoustic quality of sounds which are perceived as "weakening"

linguistic pattern where a morpheme has multiple phonetic realizations

phonetic phenomenon in Uralic languages

how often each letter appears on average in a written language

sandhi

lengthening of vowel sounds in place of a deleted consonant

Praat ( ; ) is a free, open-source computer software package widely used for speech analysis and synthesis in phonetics and other fields of linguistics. The software was developed and is maintained by Paul Boersma and David Weenink at the University of Amsterdam, and is compatible most major operating systems, including Unix, Linux, Mac, and Microsoft Windows. Praat has been used in linguistic research on endangered and minority languages, as well as for analyzing regional accents and phonetic variation.

syllable added to the beginning of the word in certain languages

In linguistics, assibilation is a sound change resulting in a sibilant consonant. It is a form of spirantization and is commonly the final phase of palatalization.

Paragoge () is the addition of a sound to the end of a word. It is a type of epenthesis.

A metaplasm is almost any kind of alteration, whether intentional or not, in the pronunciation or the orthography of a word. The change may be phonetic only, such as pronouncing Mississippi as Missippi in English, or acceptance of a new word structure, such as the transformation from calidus in Latin to caldo (hot) in Italian. Orthographic metaplasms have been used in philosophy to advance humanity's conceptual terrain, such as when Derrida adapted Heidegger's Destruktion into deconstruction or the French term différence into différance. Changes at either level may or may not be recognized in

hierarchical ranking of speech sounds

neurodevelopmental disorder that affects how the brain processes sounds

series of obstruent consonants in Semitic languages, which originally contrasted with series of both voiced and voiceless obstruents; may be realized as uvularized or pharyngealized, velarized, ejective, or plain voiced or voiceless

thumb | right | Cover of the October 1905 issue of Jabberwock: a Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless.

Akanye ( ) or akanje ( ; ) is a sound change in Slavic languages in which the phonemes or are realized as more or less close to . It is a case of vowel reduction.

orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the phonemes of the language

phonetic situation where multiple different pronunciations are possible in a given language without changing a word's meaning

Crasis (; from the Greek , ) is a type of contraction in which two vowels or diphthongs merge into one new vowel or diphthong, making one word out of two (univerbation). Crasis occurs in many languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; it was first described in Ancient Greek.

In linguistics, a proparoxytone (, ) is a word with either stress (in stress-based languages) or a high accent (in languages with a pitch accent) on the antepenultimate syllable (that is, the third-to-last syllable). Examples of this in English are the words words "cinema" and "operational". It contrasts with paroxytone (on the penultimate second-to-last syllable), and oxytone (on the ultimate last syllable).

A synalepha or synaloepha is the merging of two syllables into one, especially when it causes two words to be pronounced as one.

term in phonetics

schematic arrangement of the vowels

linguistic phenomenon where some phonemes of a language are found in some cases and others are found in similar but different cases; often indicating sound change and divergent mutual descents