Being a medium of communication language plays a vital role in humans’ life. Language also possesses important social purpose instead of being a mere linguistic system. Language mainly comprises two forms, spoken and written. Verbal form of language is way more important than written form of language. Humans learnt to speak language long before they learnt how to write. In a way we can certainly say that the most archaic and ancient form of language is spoken form. Even though in present days the written form of a language is considered to be more formal than the verbal form of the language.
Verbal or spoken form of language is also termed as speech. Phonetics is a branch of linguistics which studies and investigates speech sounds. Phonetics is again categorised further into three different sub-braches. They are- Acoustic phonetics, Auditory phonetics and Articulatory phonetics.
Sounds of one language differ from the others, so do the dialects. English speech sounds are mainly divided into two different categories i.e. consonantal sounds and vowel sounds. Phonetics categorises consonantal the sounds in terms of their structure while producing the sound. Here, we can mention about certain processes like phonation process, oro- nasal process, airstream mechanism etc. On the other hand vowel sounds are categories in to certain sub- categories further- like diphthongs, monophthongs etc.
