The Sounds of Language is an introductory guide to the linguistic study of speech sounds, which provides uniquely balanced coverage of both phonology and phonetics.Features exercises and problem sets, as well as supporting online resources (available on publication) at www.wiley.com/go/zsiga, including additional discussion questions and exercises, as well as links to further resources such as sound files, video files, and useful websites Creates opportunities for students to practice data analysis and hypothesis testingIntegrates data on sociolinguistic variation, first language acquisition, and second language learningExplores diverse topics ranging from the practical, such as how to make good digital recordings, make a palatogram, solve a phoneme/allophone problem, or read a spectrogram; to the theoretical, including the role of markedness in linguistic theory, the necessity of abstraction, features and formal notation, issues in speech perception as distinct from hearing, and modelling sociolinguistic and other variationsOrganized specifically to fit the needs of undergraduate students of phonetics and phonology, and is structured in a way which enables instructors to use the text both for a single semester phonetics and phonology course or for a two-course sequence