With every coming year more and more children suffer from speech problems, making their parents visit various specialists (pediatrician, neurologist, speech therapist, defectologist), who use their diagnostic techniques to detect speech disorders. The absence of a unified classification system and diagnostics leads to the late correction of speech disorders. The article considers main reasons for disturbances in normal speech development, risk factors of speech pathology, clinical manifestations of some types of speech disorders, various approaches to diagnosis and systematization of speech disorders.Conflict of interest: The authors of this article confirmed the lack of conflict of interest and financial support, which should be reported.