The Sub-Fields of Linguistics
Language is a phenomenon with many layers, from the sounds that speakers produce to the meanings that those sounds express. The field of Linguistics is comprised of several sub-fields. Most professional linguists become specialists in one or more of these sub-fields. The major ones are:
Phonetics: The study of speech sounds. Phoneticians study both the production of speech sounds by the human speech organs (articulatory phonetics) and the properties of the sounds themselves (acoustic phonetics). Phoneticians are concerned with such questions as: …What are the sounds, from among all those that humans could make, that actually exist in the world’s languages? …What specially defines different “accents”? …Can speakers be identified by “voiceprints”? ...What are the properties of sounds that would apply in computerized speech synthesis?