DDL keywords

The way the world’s languages rely on different inventories of sounds to build the words of their lexicon contribute in a significant way to their diversity. Far from being randomly assembled, these inventories of various sizes are as many possible answers to the physiological, perceptive and cognitive human features; in these systems, sounds occur in a structured way, especially in terms of meaningful oppositions with respect to the lexicon. Phonology and phonetics both aim at unravelling the main principles of the structure and evolution of sound systems, and therefore at understanding their typological diversity in terms of underlying mechanisms