ABSTRACT
The phonological system is the set of consonant and vowel units that make up the words of a specific language or language variety. A relatively simple test is to look for minimal pairs.A minimal pair is a pair of words from the language that people are investigating that differs in only one sound. The allophones concerned must also be phonetically similar. The notions of phonemes and allophones are important in phonetic transcription. In a broad transcription people usually only transcribe the phoneme values used by the speaker. Narrow transcription aims to record as much detail as possible and so should include as many of the allophonic distinctions used by the speaker as can be detected. The phonological structure determines which clusters are found and in which position. It will also determine any patterns in these clusters, and whether these patterns alter in multisyllable words as opposed to single syllable words.
