1. Introduction
Welcome to the webpage accompanying Chapter 12 "Analysing phonetic and phonological variation on the segmental level" by Ulrike Gut!
1. Introduction
The English language has been and always will be susceptible to change. The great vowel shift altered the distribution of long vowels in the English language in a matter of 300 years.
There are a large number of different varieties of English and all of them differ in terms of their vowels, consonants, speech rhythm, intonation and word stress etc. Due to this perpetually ongoing process of language variation it has become almost impossible to keep track of changing speech styles in the different varieties of English. Nevertheless, if one wants to gain a good understanding of how speech evolves over time, acquainting oneself with the respective methods for the investigation of language change is an inevitable necessity.
Today, the development of digital processing enables linguists to make use of a wide range of inventions and techniques which would have been far too expensive and complex 20 years ago. In today's day and age, theoretically anyone can use a computer to process data and come up with conclusions about almost anything.
Similar to most other scientific fields, linguistic research has been positively influenced by technological developments which have facilitated the use of computers, enabling researchers to record any kind of linguistically interesting feature such as a particular accent or dialect on an mp3 player in order to later analyse it.
A linguist must no longer rely on oscilloscopes or bandpass filters in order to take a look at the wave form of a sound or a word or to get the spectrum of a vowel or a consonant.
With the advent of programs such as Praat such valuable data is literally just a click away. In the following, I will sum up the fundamental ideas which underlie the research field of acoustic phonetics and will give a step by step description of the basic functions of Praat.
In the second part, I will demonstrate how to operate Praat by means of a case study in which I compare the features of a native speaker's voice to those of an English Language Learner's.
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