phonetician

1 9.2

A person who studies the sounds people make when they speak

noun
/fəˈnɛtɪʃən/

Specialized

: fonetista

A skilled phonetician can analyze the subtle differences in speech sounds across languages.

Examples

During the conference, the phonetician presented their research on accent variations in British English.
It appears that, at heart, you have the morose spirit of a mere phonetician.

Blog text (29)
Fostered by a distinguished phonetician, Henry Sweet, who also became famous for providing the model for Professor Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion," this European version, known as the "Direct Method," became readily available to most European teachers of foreign languages.

Academic text (1994)
The Pygmalion of this story, phonetician Henry Higgins, creates his Galatea by teaching a low-class flower girl, Liza Doolittle, to talk and behave like an upper-class, high-society lady.

Academic text (1996)
Many phoneticians focus on understanding how speech sounds are produced and perceived.

Surface Forms

phonetician singular

phoneticians plural

Morphology

phonetician = phonetic (transparent) = phonetic + ian

Formed by adding the agentive suffix '-ian' to 'phonetic' to mean 'a person who specialises in phonetics', a straightforward derivation.

Etymology

The word phonetician comes from the Greek root phon- meaning 'sound', and you can see the same root in phone and telephone. The ending -ician means 'specialist', like in musician, so a phonetician is a 'sound specialist' who studies speech sounds.