ENGLISH SOUNDS (PHONOLOGY)

Sound is the most pervasive medium through which human language is communicated. Except for American Sign Language, and other specially developed communication systems like it, there is no human language that is not spoken. When we want to know whether someone knows a particular language, like English, we do not ask, “Do you write English?” or “Do you read English?” Rather, we ask, “Do you speak English?” An adequate account of the English language must say something about the sounds that we use to encode words and sentences.
If we want to talk about and describe the sounds of a human language like English (what linguists call the phonology of English), what particular set of sounds will we focus on in our study? Are language sounds produced by a musical instrument such as a trumpet or a drum? Can they be produced by banging a stick on a stone? No. They are a special class of sounds: they must be sounds that are producible by the human body, and not just any part of the human body. If you clap your hands, or snap your fingers, or stomp your foot, are you producing a language sound? No. To be part of the phonology of a language, a sound must be producible by specific parts of the body. These are called the organs of speech. And while machines such as CD or tape players can imitate or reproduce language sounds, this does not change the definition of such sounds. Machines can be built to produce a variety of sounds, but unless the sounds correspond to sounds that the organs of speech can produce, they are not human language sounds.