Chapter 11 opens by asking readers to imagine what different kinds of people likely know and don’t know. For example, everyone knows that things fall when you drop them. But details of social etiquette and childhood memories will vary across people. This exercise relates to the Maxim of Manner, which focuses on brevity, clarity, and orderliness for contributions to successful conversations. Information structure is central here: Learning is enhanced when learners meet given or familiar information before new or unfamiliar information. In other words, we build on what we already know. One reason that this point is critical to public engagement is that we compute meaning for words and sentences as we hear/read them. The Worked Example uses a demonstration in which we write people’s names in the International Phonetic Alphabet to compare two orders for presenting critical information. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to write down an ideal interaction they want with the demonstrations they are developing and then to change the order of the elements around.

A key aspect of academic phonetics is transcription. Transcription involves writing speech in a special alphabet called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that permits writing the sounds of speech with great precision. The modern IPA is the result of historical development, and it incorporates a number of principles that contribute to ease of use: based on the latin (roman) alphabet; extending letters by modification of latin letters; use of other known letters; use of diacritics (accents); and others. Transcription may lean toward being broad or phonological, ortoward being narrow or strictly phonetic. The IPA makes typographic distinctions that we do not make in nonphonetic writing. Glyphs are specific letter shapes, and the IPA may distinguish glyphs that are not distinguished in ordinary writing.

Chapter 2 uses a variety of investigative activities to guide readers through an exploration of the sounds and articulations of the world’s languages and the linguistic rules that govern their appearances. It begins with an overview of the acoustic characteristics of speech sounds, which are then employed in a discussion of the articulation apparatus. Throughout, students are directed to engage in their own investigations with the material via the Discover Activities. Various data from a variety of languages are provided to illustrate different phonological rules, and the techniques linguists use to discover them through analysis. These insights are then transferred to a discussion of transformations and processes that complicate phonological systems.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of phonetics, the study of human speech sounds. It examines two main approaches: articulatory phonetics, which shows how humans produce the sounds of language, and acoustic phonetics, which explains the physical properties of speech sounds. The chapter explains how speech is produced by modifying the shape of the vocal tract and how the articulators interact. We learn why the International Phonetic Alphabet is necessary to study world languages, and ample practice in using the IPA is provided. Practice goes hand in hand with a detailed categorization and description of speech sounds, both consonants and vowels, summarized in charts and figures. The chapter also examines speech processes which lead to changes in the quality of a sound due to the linguistic context. Descriptions and examples of processes such as assimilation, palatalization, nasalization, dissimilation, epenthesis, and deletion, are included in this section. The final part of the chapter introduces readers to acoustic properties of speech sounds by focusing on spectrograms and how to interpret them.