LING 045. Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics explores the full range of sounds (and their signed counterparts) produced by humans for use in language and the gestural, acoustic, and auditory properties that characterize those sounds. Phonology investigates how those sounds are represented, organized, and combined in languages, and the properties and cognitive mechanisms that guide their use. This course uses data from languages around the world and focuses on recognizing patterns in the data and developing analyses to account for them within a given theoretical framework. Students will learn to transcribe speech from familiar and unfamiliar languages, read spectrograms, and understand how speech sounds are produced in the vocal tract. For their final project, students will gather original data to describe the sound system of a language of their choice.
Social sciences.
1 credit.
Eligible for COGS.
Fall 2025. Washington.
Spring 2026. Washington.
Fall 2026. Gasser.
Spring 2027. Washington.
Catalog chapter: Linguistics
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/linguistics

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