Page "Phonology" Paragraph 2

Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics.

While phonetics concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning.

In other words, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics, and phonology to theoretical linguistics.

Note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of phoneme in the mid 20th century.

Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception, resulting in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology.