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The spoken word is the foundation of all languages.
—Linguaphone motto
Language is one means of communication, and itself can take two forms—spoken or written. In our daily use of language, more often than not, we listen and speak so as to communicate. Since languages are primarily spoken, an important part of the overall understanding of language involves the study of the sounds of language.
Different languages may use different SPEECH SOUNDs in their spoken language systems. Chinese doesn't have the [θ] sound which initiates the English word think; while the English users find it difficult to address a Chinese whose family name is“张”(zhang)
or“常”（chang）. To understand how different sounds are articulated, we have to appeal to some physical properties universal to all human speech sounds, such as the "places of articulation", the "manners of articulation", etc. PHONETICS is the field of language study concerning the physical properties of sounds. In the phonetic study, we describe a sound unit by referring to its phonetic properties.
When we talk with others, we produce or hear dozens of sound segments in a single second. The use of speech sounds is such an instant event that we may easily ignore the series of processes involved in it—When we are speaking, we utter sequences of sounds in certain patterns. The sounds will travel in the air and reach the listener's ears. Having received the sounds, the listener needs to figure out what they mean. The phoneticians give their attention to each of these processes and analyze the speech sounds from different angles. Therefore, different branches of phonetics derive.
In this chapter, we shall focus on one branch of Phonetics—the ARTICULATORY PHONETICS, which studies the sound units from the angle of how each sound segment is articulated. We shall start from a discussion on how to transcribe the speech sounds. Then we go on exploring the speech organs—the parts of our body that are involved in sound articulation. We will try to find out how the phonetic properties of sounds are realized with the collaboration of the speech organs. Two general categories of sounds—vowels and consonants will also be discussed in this chapter.