Phonetics

Diagram of parts of body involved in producing speech sounds Phones: the collection of all sounds that humans can make.

Phonemes: The sub-set of phones that distinguish meaning in a specific language.

All people have the capacity to make the same set of sounds. Each human language uses a sub-set of this: its own set of phonemes.

Human languages vary greatly in the number of phonemes they use.

Japanese and Hawaiian have relatively few...around 20. Hmong has about 80, !Xu (in Southern Africa) may have as many as 140. English has 35-40.