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Speech is the use of words in human voice communication. Each language employs phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds to create the sound of its words, and then uses those words in their semantic character as words in the lexicon of the language according to the syntactic restrictions that regulate the function of lexical words in a sentence. Speakers utilize enunciation, intonation, degrees of loudness, pace, and other non-representational or paralinguistic characteristics of vocalization to transmit meaning in many different purposeful speech actions, such as informing, announcing, inquiring, persuading, and guiding. Speakers unintentionally communicate many aspects of their social position in their speech, including sex, age, place of origin (via accent), physical states (alertness and sleepiness, vigor or weakness, health or illness), psychic states (emotions or moods), physico-psychic states (sobriety or drunkenness, normal consciousness and trance states), education or experience, and so on.

Although people normally use speech to communicate with other people (or animals), when they swear, they do not always mean to communicate anything to anyone, and they sometimes use speech as a quasi-magical cause to express urgent emotions or desires, such as when they encourage or warn a player in a game to do or not do something. People also participate in solo speaking in a variety of contexts. People sometimes talk to themselves in acts that are a development of what some psychologists (e.g., Lev Vygotsky) have maintained is the use of silent speech in an interior monologue to vivify and organize cognition, and sometimes in the momentary adoption of a dual persona as self addressing self as if addressing another person. Solo speech can be used in prayer or meditation, as well as to learn or test one’s memorization of items (e.g., the use of a mantra).

Speech production and perception of sounds used in a language, speech repetition, speech errors, the ability to map heard spoken words onto the vocalizations needed to recreate them, which plays a key role in children’s vocabulary expansion, and what different areas of the human brain, such as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, underpin speech are all investigated by researchers. Linguistics, cognitive science, communication studies, psychology, computer science, speech pathology, otolaryngology, and acoustics all study speech. Speech is compared to written language, which may differ from spoken language in vocabulary, syntax, and phonetics, a condition known as diglossia.

The evolutionary origins of speech remain unclear, and there is a lot of discussion and disagreement about it. Animals utilize vocalizations to communicate, and trained apes like Washoe and Kanzi can use elementary sign language, but no animal’s vocalizations are phonemically and syntactically articulated, therefore they do not constitute speech.

Speech production is a multi-step process that transforms thoughts into spoken words. The selection of relevant words and their proper forms from the lexicon and morphology, as well as the organizing of those words through syntax, are all part of the production process. The phonetic qualities of the words are then recovered, and the phrase is articulated using the articulations that correspond to those phonetic features.

In linguistics (articulatory phonetics), articulation refers to the way sounds are produced using the tongue, lips, jaw, vocal cords, and other speech organs. The style and location of articulation are used to characterize speech sounds. The constriction of the airstream in the mouth is referred to as the place of articulation. The way the speech organs interact is determined by factors such as how tightly the air is confined, the kind of airstream employed (e.g. pulmonic, implosive, ejectives, and clicks), if the vocal cords vibrate, and whether the nasal cavity is opened to the airstream. The notion is most commonly utilized to produce consonants, but it may also be used to vowels in characteristics like voicing and nasalization. There may be numerous modes of articulation, and hence several homorganic consonants, for any given location of articulation.