speech (linguistics)

Communication through spoken words.

The study of speech sounds (or spoken language) is the branch of linguistics known as phonetics. The study of sound changes in a language is phonology.

See also:

• Allegro Speech
• Colloquial
• Connected Speech
• Consonants and Vowels
• Conversation
• Conversation Analysis
• Dialect
• Dialogue
• Echo Utterance
• Literacy
• Orality
• Phatic Communication
• Pronunciation
• Punctuation Effect
• Reported Speech
• Rhythm
• Speaker
• Speech (Rhetoric)
• Speech Community
• Telegraphic Speech

Etymology:

Examples and Observations:

• "Many people believe that written language is more prestigious than spoken language--its form is likely to be closer to Standard English, it dominates education and is used as the language of public administration. In linguistic terms, however, neither speech nor writing can be seen as superior. Linguists are more interested in observing and describing all forms of language in use than in making social and cultural judgements with no linguistic basis."
  (Sara Thorne, Mastering Advanced English Language, 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)



• "Once we decide to begin an analysis of speech, we can approach it on various levels. At one level, speech is a matter of anatomy and physiology: we can study organs such as tongue and larynx in the production of speech. Taking another perspective, we can focus on the speech sounds produced by these organs--the units that we commonly try to identify by letters, such as a 'b-sound' or an 'm-sound.' But speech is also transmitted as sound waves, which means that we can also investigate the properties of the sound waves themselves. Taking yet another approach, the term 'sounds' is a reminder that speech is intended to be heard or perceived and that it is therefore possible to focus on the way in which a listener analyzes or processes a sound wave."
  (J. E. Clark and C. Yallop, An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Wiley-Blackwell, 1995)



• "Because so much of our lives in a literate society has been spent dealing with speech recorded as letters and text in which spaces do separate letters and words, it can be extremely difficult to understand that spoken language simply does not have this characteristic. . . . [A]lthough we write, perceive, and (to a degree) cognitively process speech linearly--one sound followed by another--the actual sensory signal our ear encounters is not composed of discretely separated bits. This is an amazing aspect of our linguistic abilities, but on further thought one can see that it is a very useful one. The fact that speech can encode and transmit information about multiple linguistic events in parallel means that the speech signal is a very efficient and optimized way of encoding and sending information between individuals. This property of speech has been called parallel transmission."
  (Dani Byrd and Toben H. Mintz, Discovering Speech, Words, and Mind. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)