Linguistic key tools for knowledge and innovative applications

The linguistic dimension allows an extraordinary observation of man and his relationships whose many aspects are generally conveyed by spoken and written speech communication. Inside the linguistic domain, the phonetic field and the related phonological one characterize the speech on the base of different levels of analysis reflecting the historical period, the geographic area, as well as the psychological, sociological, cultural and professional spheres of the individuals. The presentation will propose a synthesis on the topic, mainly referring to the many years of personal research that began with the degree thesis in 1973 and which deals with a set of European languages, namely Sardinian, Italian, French, English, German and Ladin, as well as the tonal African Chadic Musey. Ultimately, it will essentially focus on current experimental procedures mostly concerning the acoustic analysis of linguistic units, which permit, as known, a numerical «translation», together with a set of different shape representations, of the auditory sensations produced by the related sounds. Experimental procedures, whose utility covers a wide range of applications in current different fields rotating around the speech communication, such as the linguistic domain (from the Dialectology to the modern Language Teaching), the advertising, the industry (i.e. the telecommunications, the security, the robotics), the medicine, the forensic, and so on.