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  Peter Roach

Phonetics Departments at Universities

7/2/2015

3 Comments

 
There is a Wikipedia article with this title here. It simply contains the names of eight institutions, and a few links to other places. Most of those listed don’t actually have a Department of Phonetics. The list raises an interesting question: in my young days there were many universities, particularly in Europe, which had departments with the title ‘Department of Phonetics’. I studied in one (UCL), but never worked in one – I taught phonetics in the Department of Linguistic Science at Reading University and in the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics at the University of Leeds. All the ones I used to know have now been absorbed into bigger units with longer titles, and I really wonder how many Departments of Phonetics actually exist anywhere in the world. Perhaps someone could put me right on this? The nearest I can see in this list is Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (Poland), which I have had the pleasure of visiting, but that is a Department of Phonetics and Phonology. If you Google ‘Department of Phonetics’, the only names that come up are the University of Turku , Finland and the University of Zagreb, Croatia, neither of which appears in the WP article’s list. There is a Department of Phonetics and Spoken English at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.

I am going to propose that the current WP article is of no use and gives a misleading impression of the place of phonetics in the academic world. If someone would produce a list of universities or institutions which teach phonetics it might be worth publishing that as a WP article, but it would be difficult to decide which institutions should be included. Would we list places which just teach one module on Speech Communication? A one-semester class on Pronunciation Teaching?

3 Comments
Petr link
12/2/2015 10:14:29 am

What about these?
Germany

Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics
Universität des Saarlandes

Fach Phonetik
Universität Trier

Institut für Phonetik
Universität Frankfurt

Institut für Phonetik und Sprachverarbeitung
Universität München

Lehrstuhl für Experimentelle Phonetik
Universität Stuttgart

Institut für Linguistik – Phonetik
Universität Köln

Reply
Peter
12/2/2015 12:45:22 pm

Thanks for this list, good to see so many places active!

Reply
Sidney Wood link
14/2/2015 04:44:30 am

Petr's list underlines what you wrote, that there are fewer and fewer independent departments of phonetics. Phonetics and General Linguistics have been combined in one department in all Swedish universities. At Lund, we've both shared the same computer facilities, labs and technical resources for many years.

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    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

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