Linguistics undergrads learn about the vocal system and how your anatomy moves and contracts to form human speech. You begin to see vocal cords as a reed and your head as a resonant chamber. I remember my own classes at University of Kansas making me hyper aware of the way people spoke, even imagining corresponding phonetic symbols as subtitles. Like my Swedish friend whose accent sounds like a whisper. To me, “raspberries” is /ˈɹæzˌbɛɹiz/ where the s’s had hard /z/ sounds but for her it’s /ˈɹæsˌbɛɹis/ where the s’s had soft sound. The only difference between these sounds is that your vocal cords are either vibrating /z/ or not /s/. The Swedes are quite literally soft spoken people.

These phonetic symbols are characters from International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a universal system for transcribing human speech. Each depicts individual units of sounds (called phones). It works for every language and vocal sound, from Berber to beat-boxing. You can even write the sound of a kiss [ʘ], known as a bilabial click. It considers all of the ways air can be manipulated in a human vocal system, leaving no sound unaccounted for — unless you have an anatomical adaptation.