this presentation is for the learners who have the queries regarding the need and importance of learning phonetics.

1. PHONETICS
Prepared by: Dr. Sheelu Singh Bhatia

2. DEFINITION
 A word phonetics is taken from the Greek word phone meaning
sound or voice.
 Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies the sounds of
humanoid speech, or in the case of the sign languages.
 Phonetics is the science or the study of speech sounds and their
construction, conduction, their examination, organization, and
transcript.

3. NEED OF LEARNING
PHONETICS
 How confident are you when speaking English?
 Do you find yourself shy to communicate because of your level of
pronunciation?
 Are you sure, whatever you are speaking is correctly pronounced?
 Being an engineering student, why you need to learn phonetics?

4. BASIC PURPOSE OF
PHONETICS
 Phonetics is taught and learnt to get in communication skills :
1. Fluency
2. Accuracy

5. WHY LEARN PHONETICS
 Let’s take an example:
 Fish: It is pronounced as / f Ι ∫ /
 Consider a word : ‘ G H O T I ’ .
 What would be its pronunciation? What if , as Shaw said, it is also
pronounced as : / f Ι ∫ /
? ? ? ?

6.  CONFUSED???
 CONSIDER THESE WORDS
1. Laugh - /l a : f/
2. Women - /wΙmΙn/
3. Initia l - / ΙnΙ ∫ l /
Meaning: gh = /f/ -o- = /Ι/ - t i - = / ∫ /
Therefore, ‘GHOTI = FISH’ The pronunciation i s possible because : Women
Laugh Initial
GH+O+TI = /f Ι ∫ /

7. IMPORTANCE OF
PHONEMIC SYMBOLS
 Learners of English dream to have a native like pronunciation.
 To do so, a thorough knowledge of the sound system of English is
obligatory.
 English has 26 alphabets whereas 44 phonemes. Spellings are not
enough for good pronunciation because :
1 . Some letters have more than one sound.
2 . Some times letters are not pronounced at all.
3 . Same sound may be denoted by altered letters.

8. IMPORTANCE OF
PHONETIC
TRANSCRIPTION
 With the learning of phonetic transcription, the learner is capable of inscription
of speech. Even if you don’t know the pronunciation of a word, you can only know
it from the dictionary, if you know the phonetic transcription. English has lots of
borrowed words, which cannot follow a certain pattern of pronunciation:
Re n d e z vo u s
If you know the phonetic transcription then you can easily pronounce this word
correctly, which is
/ ' rɑndɪvu: /

9. LET,S PRACTICE
 Pronounce the word:
BOURGEOIS

10.  The pronunciation of this word is
/ˈbʊəʒwɑː/

11. LET,S TAKE ANOTHER
EXAMPLE
PIZZA
 LET,S PRONOUNCE IT
 IT,S /ˈpiːtsə/

12.  SCHEDULE
[ ˈʃedjuːl ]
 PROCEDURE
/prəˈsiːdʒə(r)/

13. BRANCHES OF PHONETICS
 Articulatory Phonetics: the study of the production of speech
by the organs of speech by the speaker.

15. BRANCHES OF PHONETICS
 Acoustic Phonetics: the study of the physical properties of
speech, and aims to analyse sound wave signals that occur within
speech through varying frequencies, amplitudes and durations.
 Auditory Phonetics: a subfield of phonetics concerned with the
hearing of speech sounds.

18. /ΘÆŊK-JUː/