Really? Do We Have Anything Like English Sound. Sound is Sound Right?

I was taken aback when I first saw the question. My initial reaction was, “Ohh that is easy”. Once you can say any word in any language you are definitely producing a sound in that language, right ? Well that is quite correct, but for academic purpose and as an assignment which will surely contribute to you grade, One should be able to produce a convincing argument with the necessary facts back with research to support his answer. After all we are in tertiary, where you are urge to question everything and make your own contribution. Not just be a parrot doing copy and paste.

You will agree with me that sound is sound whether it is coming from an English speaker or German speaker etcetera. Any language that is spoken becomes a sound for that matter human sound (Speech Sound), et cetera and not a language sound. If a sound can be categorized as human sound , we sure do have animal sounds, vehicular sounds, et cetera or you can go ahead and name the rest.

For the purpose of this assignment, this is how I provided my answer to the question that led me to learn a lot about English and Oral Science (including biology) of making speech sound at the same time I revised my note on sounds and vibration within a few hours. First I recalled what sound is and it relationship with vibration. Then how human generate and perceive what sound speech is. From then you can fully understand sound in relation to language (English Sound).

So What is Sound?

Well for the general definition of sound as we all know, Sound is a form of energy which is produced as a result of movement of matter, or vibration of particles.

Speech sound produced orally by human comes about as a result of upward movement of air wave from the lungs to the throat. In the throat there is a wind pipe, on top this pipe is the voice box. The voice box is made up of two cords vertically aligned with a gap in between for passage of air when talking. When this air wave from the lungs hit the voice box, the cords can either vibrate by opening or closing in the process a speech sound is produced. The sound that is produced depends on number of factors such as the position of the tongue, the shape of the lips, how wide or narrow the voice cord is the voice box. These factors enhance the type of sound that is produced, that is high or low sound.

We can therefore have little knowledge about how language sound for that matter English sound are produced. The English language is made up of 26 letters called alphabets. When these letters are pronounced, they come out with their own unique sounds, courtesy the lungs, voice box, glottis, tongue, teeth and the shape of the lips. These sounds are group into what we called vowels and consonants speech sound. Since these sounds that are made are coming from a letter or combination of letters from the English alphabets, we can the say that English sounds are produced.

Again, since sound is universal, language experts and linguistic further research into making language sound more scientific and acceptable, Cardinal Vowel Chart was born , which serve as a guide and standard to measure how close language vowels and sound are related. That is why we have English Vowel chart.