phoneme
A phoneme () is a set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial–gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are studied under phonology, a branch of linguistics (a discipline encompassing language, writing, speech and related matters).
AI overview
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that speakers recognize as distinct and use to tell words apart—for example, the "p" and "b" sounds that differentiate "pat" from "bat." Understanding phonemes matters because they form the basic building blocks that languages use to create meaning, and linguists study them to understand how all languages organize and use sound.
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Article
21 sectionsContents
- Examples and notation
- Conceptual basis; theory of the definition of phonemes
- Assignment of speech sounds to phonemes
- Minimal pairs
- Suprasegmental phonemes
- Distribution of allophones
- Background and related ideas
- Restrictions on occurrence
- Biuniqueness
- {{anchor|Neutralization}}Neutralization and archiphonemes
- Morphophonemes
- Numbers of phonemes in different languages
- Non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions
- Correspondence between letters and phonemes
- Phonemes in sign languages
- Chereme{{anchor|Cherology}}{{anchor|Chereme}}
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
- External links
A phoneme () is a set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial–gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are studied under phonology, a branch of linguistics (a discipline encompassing language, writing, speech and related matters).
Phonemes are often represented, when written, as a glyph (a character) enclosed within two forward-sloping slashes . For example, /k/ represents the phoneme or sound used at the beginning of the English-language word cat (as opposed to, say, the /b/ of bat).