A phonetician is a person who studies speech sounds in a scientific way. The field is called phonetics; the phonetician is the expert who does that work. They look at how we make sounds with the lips, tongue, and breath, how those sounds travel as waves in the air, and how the ear takes them in. Though actually, people outside the field often use phonetician for anyone who works with speech sounds, and that is a little loose. A phonetician cares about the real, physical sound. A phonologist cares about the system a language builds with those sounds — which differences “count,” and which the language treats as the same. The two jobs sit side by side, and some people do both, but the words are not twins. You will almost never hear phonetician in a shop or on the bus. It belongs to universities, labs, and specialist books. If a student says “I want to study phonetician,” the kind reply is: you study phonetics; you become a phonetician.

語音學家