PHONETICS

The branch of linguistics that deals with the sounds of speech and their production, combination, description, and representation by written symbols.

Phonetics is the branch of linguistics that examines sounds in a language. Phonetics describes these sounds using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

The IPA uses a single symbol to desribe each sound in a language. If a letter in a word is silent, there will be no IPA symbol used in the transcriptions.