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How does phonetics differ from phonology?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.
Diagram of a human head in profile showing the location of vocal organs and possible places of articulation for speech sounds, with labels for lips, teeth, tongue, palate, uvula, pharynx, and vocal cords, and numbered regions corresponding to types of articulation such as bilabial, alveolar, and velar.
phonetics Diagram depicting the location of human vocal organs and possible places of articulation used for speech.

In linguistics, phonetics and phonology are distinct but related fields of study concerning speech sounds.

Phonetics is the study of the physical aspects of speech. It focuses on the anatomy and physiology of the vocal tract used to produce sounds (articulatory phonetics) and the acoustic properties of those sound waves (acoustic phonetics). Phonetics treats speech sounds as physical units called phones, which are analyzed based on their acoustic qualities rather than their function within a specific language.123

Phonology, by contrast, is the study of the sound systems and patterns within a language. While phonetics examines how sounds are made, phonology investigates how those sounds function to create meaning. It identifies phonemes—the smallest units of sound that distinguish one word from another—and determines the rules governing how sounds are organized, such as which sequences are permissible in a given language.423

In short, phonetics is concerned with the physical reality of speech, whereas phonology is concerned with the abstract, functional organization of sounds within a language's structure.23