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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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Commons category: Phonemes
Stack Exchange tag: linguistics.stackexchange.com/tags/phonemes
P13411: September 23
equivalent class: purl.org/linguistics/gold/Phoneme

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Article

21 sections

Contents

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

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).