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Phonology (sometimes called phonemics or phonematics) is the study of how sounds are used in languages to convey meaning. The term of phonology (Greek phone - sound, logos – science) appeared in linguistics in the necessity of differentiating functional (linguistic) sides of speech sounds from the physiological-acoustic (physic) sides in the end of XIX century. It studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. It deals with the sounds systems of a language by treating phoneme as the point of departure.
With another word, phonetics deals with sounds and phonology deals with phonemes. Or else phonology deals with language sounds and phonetics deals with human speech sounds.
Phonetics and phonology have two levels: segmental and suprasegmental. Segmental phonology studies phonemes realized in avarious speech sound. So it may be called phonemics. Suprasegmental phonology (prosodics) studies the distinctive features realized in syllables, stress, and intonation.
The fundamental concept of phonemics is the phoneme which is the smallest meaningless unit of a language and which forms, distinguishes words and morphemes. The linguistic form and content are described by other branches of linguistics.
At a given time, the set of phonemes in a language is a closed set (like function words and syntactic rules). The set of phonemes changes only over time.
English, for instance, has lost the phonemes [x] and [∑]. English has also gained phonemes by borrowing foreign words with the sounds [z] and [Z]. Neither of these sounds was phonemes in English until they entered the language in numerous words borrowed from Norman French after 1066. Similarly, the sound [t] was not part of Russian until after the Christianization in 988, when many Greek words containing [f] were borrowed by the Slavs.
The Phonological typology deals with thecomparison of units of the phonological level of language. It engages in theallocation of phonological differential signs, defining their universality, study of thephonological structure of languages, classification of languages based on their phonological features (e.g. tonic and atonic languages), defining thephonemic structure of world languages and many others. For a long time,the Prague linguistic school was the center of Phonological typology. A certain contribution to thedevelopment of Phonological typology was made by N.S.Trubetskoy who is considered the founder of Typology of Phonological systems.