In any language we can indentify a small number of regularly used sounds (vowels and consonants) that we call phonemes;
The rest of the course goes on to look at larger units of speech such as the syllable and at aspects of speech such as stress and intonation
The accent that we concentrate on and use as our model is the one that is most often recommended for foreign learners studying British English
It has for a long time been indentified by the name Received Pronunciation (usually abbreviated to its initials. RP), but this name is old-fashioned and misleading.
Since it is most familiar as the accent used by most announcers and newsreaders on BBC and British independent television broadcasting channels, a preferable name is BBC pronunciation.
Articulators above the larynx
After passing through the larynx, the air goes through the vocal tract, which ends at the mouth and nostrils.
We have a large and complex set of muscles that can produce changes in the shape of the vocal tract
These different parts are called articulators and the study of them is called ariculatory phonetics.


Articulators are as followings
i) The pharynx is a tube which begins just above the larynx. It is about 7 cm long in women and about 8 cm in men, and at its top end it is divided into two, one part being the back of the mouth and the other being the beginning of the way through the nasal cavity.
ii) The velum or soft palate is seen in the diagram in a position that allows air to pass through the nose and through the mouth.
iii) The hard palate is often called the “roof of the mouth”. You can feel its smooth curved surface with your tongue.
iv) The alveolar ridge is between the topfront teeth and the hard palate. You can feel its shape with your tongue. Its surface is really much rougher than it feels and is covered with little ridges. Sounds made with the tongue touching here (such as t and d) are called alveolar
v) The tongue is, of course, a very important articulator and it can be moved into many different places and different shapes.
tongue on a larger scale with these parts shown: tip, blade, front, back and root.
vi) The teeth (upper and lower) are usually shown in diagrams like fig.1 only at the front of the mouth, immediately behind the lips. Sounds made with the tongue touching the front teeth are called dental.
vii) The lips are important in speech. They can be pressed together (when we produce the sounds p, b), brought into contact with the teeth (as in f, v) or rounded to produce the lip-shape for vowels like u:. Sounds in which the lips are in contact With each other are called bilabial, while those with lip-to-teeth contact are called labiodental.
The seven articulators described above are the main ones used in speech, but there are three other things to remember firstly, the larynx could also be described as an articulator
Secondly, the jaw are sometimes called articulators
Finally, although there is practically nothing that we can do with the nose and the nasal cavity, they are a very important part of our equipment for making sounds.