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In human [[language]], a '''phoneme''' is a set of [[phone]]s (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. It is the basic unit that distinguishes between different words or [[morpheme]]s — changing an element of a word from one phoneme to another produces either a different word or obvious nonsense, whereas changing an element from one phone to another, when both belong to the same phoneme, produces the same word (sometimes with an odd or incomprehensible pronunciation).
{{subpages}}
A '''phoneme''' is a unit of [[natural language]] that can help distinguish one [[word]] from another as different meaningful units, such as /b/ versus /m/ in [[English language|English]] ''bat'' and ''mat''. It is often considered the smallest unit of language that can serve that distinguishing purpose, but others have been proposed. It is of interest in the subfield of [[linguistics]] called [[phonology]].  The English language is generally considered to have around 45 phonemes, but there is not full agreement about that number<ref>"The Information" by James Gleich, Pantheon Books, 2011, pp 23-24.  ISBN 978-9375423727</ref>. Indeed it varies between different varieties of English.


Phonemes are not the physical [[segment (linguistics)|segment]]s themselves, but mental [[abstraction]]s of them. A phoneme could be thought of as a family of related [[phone]]s, called [[allophone]]s, that the speakers of a language think of, and hear or see, as being categorically the same.  
In spoken language, phonemes are regarded as the individual 'sounds' of the language, corresponding very roughly to the sounds of the [[letter (alphabet)|letters]] of an [[alphabet]]&mdash;though a phoneme may also be in fact a small group of consecutive sounds.


In [[sign language]]s, the phoneme was formerly called a ''[[chereme]]'' (or ''cheireme''), but usage changed to ''phoneme'' when it was recognized that the mental abstractions involved are essentially the same as in oral languages.  
The concept of the phoneme is used in understanding [[sign language]]s as well.


A phonemically "perfect" [[alphabet]] is one that has a single symbol for each phoneme.
==Limitations==
The existence of phonemes is generally assumed in many fields of linguistics and [[education]], but phonemes been rejected as a true unit of analysis in mainstream phonology since the publication of [[Noam Chomsky|Chomsky]] and [[Morris Halle|Halle]]'s ''[[The Sound Pattern of English]]'' in 1968.  The problem is, that meaning is often also inferred from context, so phonemes alone may not provide enough distinguishing information. Some ''tonal'' languages, for example, have units of meaning that depend on both tone and alphabet; yet written versions of the language may lack a notation for how people use tonality. That tends to be okay, because context may provide enough additional information for the hearers of tonal language to understand which of various possible intonation-distinguished meanings was intended.


'''Phonemics''', or ''phonematics'', a branch of [[phonology]], is the study of the systems of phonemes of languages.  
The importance of context for phonemes was arguably proven well before Chomsky and Halle's study, due to the work of missionary John F. Carrington, the first European to realize how the "talking drums" in Africa could be used to communicate sophisticated messages (based on several African languages) over long distances, although they lacked the ability to articulate any vowel or consonant.  Drummers used a combination of rhythm and tonality to suggest words to listeners, dependent on context.  This was possible because of the importance of rhythm and tonality in the African languages behind the drumming.  Carrington published a book about the talking drums in the 1940's<ref><span class="newtab">[https://missiology.org.uk/pdf/e-books/carrington_j-f/talking-drums-of-africa_carrington.pdf The Talking Drums of Africa]</span>, by John F. Carrington, orig. Carey Kingsgate Press, 1949; online at "A Gateway for the Study of Christian Missions", last access 6/11/2021. </ref>.  Although the spoken languages used by the drummers also had consonant and vowel-based "phonemes", the vowels and consonants proved unnecessary for the transmission of simple messages, even including (sometimes) jokes<ref>"The Information" by James Gleich, Pantheon Books, 2011, pp 23-24.  ISBN 978-9375423727</ref>.


Although the concept has been fundamental to the development of phonological analysis of language beneath the level of the syllable, some linguists reject the theoretical validity of the phoneme. Some think that phonemes are more a product of literacy (i.e., the need to categorize the phonetics of a language in order to write it down systematically with a minimum number of letters). Other critics charge that the mind processes sub-phonemic elements of speech (e.g., [[distinctive feature|feature]]s) in meaningful ways.
==Phonemes and other phonological segments==
Phonemes are not the smallest level of sound classification. The sound inventory of a language is the set of [[phone (phonetics)|phone]]s of that language. However, phones do not distinguish meaning in themselves. What makes a phoneme a phoneme, rather than a phone, is that changing it to another phoneme may yield a different word. For instance, /mat/ ("mat") and /mad/ ("mad") are different words in English. They are distinguished by only one different phoneme: /t/ versus /d/ (put more specifically, it is the opposition between voiceless and a voiced [[dental plosive]] in the first versus the second word). This difference is called phonemic. In addition, word pairs such as "bat/mat" or "mat/mad" in English are called [[minimal pair]]s, because they are only distinguished by one phoneme.  


A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding so-called [[minimal pair]]s: words that differ only in the phones in question.  
On the other hand, the phoneme /t/ can be pronounced as one of several distinct phones ([t] ([[aspiration|unaspirated]]) and [t<sup>h</sup>] (aspirated t)), called the [[allophone]]s of /t/. The choice of allophone depends on the context surrounding the /t/ and the phonological rules in the language ([t<sup>h</sup>], for example, occurs initially in English stressed syllables, e.g. [ə.t<sup>h</sup>æk] ''attack''). As a result, changing between allophones (such as saying [tom] vs [t<sup>h</sup>om]) would not yield a new word, as above, but instead would be a violation of the phonological constraints ([[phonotactics]]) of the language.


==Background and related ideas==
==Experiments==
In [[History of India|ancient India]], the [[Sanskrit]] [[grammarian]] {{Unicode|[[Pāṇini]]}} (c. [[520 BC|520]]&ndash;[[460 BC]]), in his text of Sanskrit grammar, the ''[[Shiva Sutra]]s'', originated the concepts of the phoneme, the [[morpheme]] and the [[root (linguistics)|root]]. The ''Shiva Sutras'' describes a phonemic notational system in the fourteen initial lines of the ''{{Unicode|[[Aṣṭādhyāyī]]}}''. The notational system introduces different clusters of phonemes that serve special roles in the [[morphology (linguistics)|morphology]] of Sanskrit, and are referred to throughout the text. Panini's grammar of Sanskrit may have had a significant influence on [[Ferdinand de Saussure]], the father of modern [[structuralism]], who was a professor of Sanskrit.
The way individual phonemes are recognized in human speech can be examined by means of non-existing syllables which consist nevertheless of real phonemes, so-called [[logatome]]s.<ref>http://medi.uni-oldenburg.de/ollo/</ref>


Around the [[4th century BC]]&ndash;[[3rd century BC]], the definitions of phoneme (''oliyam'') and alphabet (''ezuththu'') were written in the [[Tolkāppiyam]], for the [[Tamil language]].  These definitions still survive as part of Tamil grammar.
==References==
<references/>


The term ''phonème'' was reportedly first used by Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it referred to only a sound of speech. The term ''phoneme'' as an [[abstraction]] was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Niecislaw [[Baudouin de Courtenay]] and his student [[Mikołaj Kruszewski]] during 1875-1895.  The term used by these two was ''fonema'', the basic unit of what they called ''psychophonetics''. The concept of the phoneme was elaborated in the works of [[Nikolai Trubetzkoi]] and other of the [[Prague School]] (during the years 1926-1935), as well as in that of [[structuralism|structuralist]]s like [[Ferdinand de Saussure]], [[Edward Sapir]], and [[Leonard Bloomfield]]. Later, it was also used in [[generative linguistics]], most famously by [[Noam Chomsky]] and [[Morris Halle]], and remains central in any accounts of the development of virtually all modern schools of [[phonology]].
==See also==
 
*[[Phonology]]
The phoneme can be defined as "the smallest meaningful psychological unit of sound." The phoneme has mental, physiological, and physical substance: our brains process the sounds; the sounds are produced by the human speech organs; and the sounds are physical entities that can be recorded and measured.
*[[Phonetics]][[Category:Suggestion Bot Tag]]
 
For an example of phonemes, consider the English words ''pat'' and ''sat'', which appear to differ only in their initial consonants. This difference, known as '''contrastiveness''' or '''opposition''', is sufficient to distinguish these words, and therefore the P and S sounds are said to be different phonemes in English. A pair of words that are identical except for such a sound are known as a [[minimal pair]]; this is the most frequent demonstration that two sounds are separate phonemes.
 
If no minimal pair can be found to demonstrate that two sounds are distinct, it may be that they are [[allophone]]s. Allophones are variant phones (i.e., sounds) that are not recognized as distinct by a speaker, and are not meaningfully different in the language, and so are perceived as "the same". This is especially likely if they consistently occur in different environments. For example, the "dark" L sound at the end of the English word "wool" is quite different from the "light" L sound at the beginning of the word "leaf", but this difference is meaningless in English, and is determined by whether the sound is at the beginning or end of a word. A native English speaker might have a hard time hearing the difference at first, but in [[Turkish language|Turkish]] the difference between "light" and "dark" L is sufficient to distinguish words. That is, they are two separate phonemes in Turkish, but allophones of a single phoneme in English.
 
The phonemic relationship of two sounds may not be obvious to a non-native speaker, which is why minimal pairs and an understanding of phonetic environments are important. For example, in [[Korean language|Korean]], there is a phoneme {{IPA|/r/}} that is a [[flap consonant|flapped]] ''r'' between vowels, and is an ''l''-sound in other phonetic contexts. These sounds are very different to an English speaker, who is attuned to hearing them because the differences are meaningful in English. However, the native Korean speaker has learned from an early age to consider the two sounds the same. Thus, Korean speakers do not differentiate the two words "ram" and "lamb", despite the fact that both R and L sounds occur in the language.
 
Across multiple languages, the same IPA symbol may be used to represent a phoneme, but their actual pronunciation may not be identical but merely similar. For example, the Finnish word ''maat'' ("countries") sounds different from the [[Received Pronunciation|British English (Received Pronunciation)]] word ''mart'' even though both are phonemically transcribed as IPA {{IPA|/mɑːt/}}[http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/hyfl/projektit/vokaalikartat_eng.html]; the Spanish word ''sin'' ("without") has a somewhat different vowel from the American English ''seen'' though both are transcribed as {{IPA|/sin/}}. Such distinctions can be made in a [[phonetic transcription]].
 
The exact number of phonemes in [[English language|English]] depends on the speaker and the method of determining phoneme vs. allophone, but estimates typically range from 40 to 45, which is above average across all languages. [[Pirahã language|Pirahã]] has only 10, while [[!Xóõ language|!Xóõ]] has 141.
 
Depending on the language and the [[alphabet]] used, a phoneme may be written consistently with one letter; however there are many exceptions to this rule — see [[#Writing systems|Writing systems]] below.
 
Some languages make use of [[tone (linguistics)|pitch]] for phonemic distinction.  In this case, the tones used are called [[toneme]]s. Some languages distinguish words made up of the same phonemes (and tonemes) by using different ''durations'' of some elements, which are called [[chroneme]]s. However, not all scholars working on languages with distinctive duration use this term.
 
Usually, long [[vowel]]s and [[consonant]]s are represented either by a length indicator or doubling of the symbol in question.
 
In sign languages, phonemes may be classified as ''Tab'' (elements of location, from Latin ''tabula''), ''Dez'' (the hand shape, from ''designator''), ''Sig'' (the motion, from ''signation''), and with some researchers, ''Ori'' (orientation). Facial expressions and mouthing are also phonemic.
 
===Notation===
A transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a languages is said to be ''phonemic''. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), '''/ /'''; these show that each enclosed symbol is claimed to be phonemically meaningful. On the other hand, a transcription that indicates finer detail, including allophonic variation like the two English L's, is said to be ''phonetic'', and is enclosed in square brackets, '''[&nbsp;]'''.
 
The common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) (/ /) around the symbol that stands for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme for the initial consonant sound in the word "phoneme" would be written as {{IPA|/f/}}. In other words, the '''[[grapheme]]s''' are <tt>&lt;ph&gt;</tt>, but this digraph represents one sound {{IPA|/f/}}. '''[[Allophone]]s''', more phonetically specific descriptions of how a given phoneme might be commonly instantiated, are often denoted in linguistics by the use of diacritical or other marks added to the phoneme symbols and then placed in square brackets ([ ]) to differentiate them from the phoneme in slant brackets (/ /). The conventions of [[orthography]] are then kept separate from both phonemes and allophones by the use of angle brackets < > to enclose the spelling.
 
The symbols of the [[International Phonetic Alphabet]] (IPA) and extended sets adapted to a particular language are often used by linguists to write phonemes of oral languages, with the principle being one symbol equals one categorical sound.  Due to problems displaying some symbols in the early days of the Internet, systems such as [[X-SAMPA]] and [[Kirshenbaum]] were developed to represent IPA symbols in plain text.  As of [[2004]], any modern [[web browser]] can display IPA symbols (as long as the [[operating system]] provides the appropriate fonts), and we use this system in this article.
 
The only published set of phonemic symbols for a sign language is the [[Stokoe notation]] developed for [[American Sign Language]], which has since been applied to [[British Sign Language]] by Kyle and Woll, and to [[Australian Aboriginal sign languages]] by Adam Kendon. However, there are several phonetic systems, such as [[SignWriting]].
 
===Examples===
 
Examples of phonemes in the [[English language]] would include sounds from the set of English consonants, like {{IPA|/p/}} and {{IPA|/b/}}. These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. However, phonemes might not be so apparent in written English, such as when they are typically represented with combined letters, called '''[[Digraph (orthography)|digraphs]]''', like &lt;sh&gt; (pronounced {{IPA|/ʃ/}}) or &lt;ch&gt; (pronounced {{IPA|/tʃ/}}).
 
To see a list of the phonemes in the English language, see [[International Phonetic Alphabet for English|IPA for English]].
 
Two sounds that may be allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, {{IPA|/p/}} has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones:aspirated as in {{IPA|/pɪn/}}, and non-aspirated as in {{IPA|/spɪn/}}. However, in many languages (e. g. [[Chinese (language)|Chinese]]), aspirated {{IPA|/pʰ/}} is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated {{IPA|/p/}}. As another example, there is no distinction between {{IPA|[r]}} and {{IPA|[l]}} in [[Japanese language|Japanese]], there is only one {{IPA|/r/}} phoneme in Japanese, although the Japanese {{IPA|/r/}} has allophones that make it sound more like an {{IPA|/l/}}, {{IPA|/d/}}, or {{IPA|/r/}} to English speakers. The sounds {{IPA|/z/}} and {{IPA|/s/}} are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in [[Spanish language|Spanish]]. {{IPA|/n/}} (as in ''run'') and {{IPA|/ŋ/}} (as in ''rung'') are phonemes in English, but allophones in [[Italian language|Italian]] and [[Spanish language|Spanish]].
 
An important phoneme is the [[chroneme]], a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as [[Finnish language|Finnish]] or [[Japanese language|Japanese]] allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like [[Italian language|Italian]] or [[Australian English phonology|Australian English]] use it after only one (in the case of Italian, consonants; in the case of Australian, vowels).
 
===Arguments against the phoneme===
 
Rather than a basic mental unit of language, some think that the phoneme may well be a perceptual artifact of alphabetic literacy (see the terms [[Phonemic awareness]] and [[Phonological awareness]]). If not that, it may be an [[epiphenomenal]] aspect to listening removed from face-to-face encounters, that is, text-like listening (qv [[phone]] and [[feature]]). It could be said that the unit of the phoneme is a necessary construct if we wish to set a dynamic, complex spoken language into static, written form expressed at a sub-syllabic level, though the model is a simplification and nowhere near phonologically or phonetically complete. The phoneme has the theoretical weakness from the perspective of phonology in that it uses, in part, lexical criteria to determine something that is supposed to be phonological (i.e., minimal pairs of words to point out phonological categories).
 
Much of phonology, while accepting the phoneme as possible model or unit of language for description, has largely moved past the segmental phoneme as a basic unit of speech, of speech processing or of language acquisition. This is because the concept of the 'feature' is viewed as beneath the level of the phoneme while also spanning across segments. Meanwhile, attempts at capturing a phonological picture of the psychological control and structure underlying real speech flounder on the inadequacies of the phoneme for such purposes (that is, the phoneme can not account for co-articulation or assimilation of controlled speech, among other phenomena). Such an endeavor is more for the field of articulatory phonology, and its rival unit of phonology is the 'articulatory gesture'. However, the term 'phoneme', though variably defined and delimited, remains a widely and uncritically accepted concept in second and foreign language teaching and in the psychology of native literacy (especially for acquisitional literacy in alphabetic languages, such as English).
 
==Restricted phonemes==
A '''restricted phoneme''' is a phoneme that can only occur in a certain environment: There are restrictions as to where it can occur. English has several restricted phonemes:
 
* {{IPA|/ŋ/}}, as in ''sing'', occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many other languages, such as [[Swahili]], {{IPA|/ŋ/}} can appear word-initially).
* {{IPA|/h/}} occurs only before vowels and at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a few languages, such as [[Arabic language|Arabic]], allow /h/ syllable-finally).
* In many American dialects with the [[Phonological history of the low back vowels#Cot-caught merger|cot-caught merger]], {{IPA|/ɔ/}} occurs only before {{IPA|/r/}}, {{IPA|/l/}}, and in the [[diphthong]] {{IPA|/ɔɪ/}}.
* In [[rhotic and non-rhotic accents|non-rhotic dialects]], {{IPA|/r/}} can only occur before a vowel, never at the end of a word or before a consonant.
* Under most interpretations, {{IPA|/w/}} and {{IPA|/j/}} occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable. However, many phonologists interpret a word like ''boy'' as either {{IPA|/bɔɪ/}} or {{IPA|/bɔj/}}.
 
==Neutralization, archiphoneme, underspecification==
Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they don't contrast, the contrast is said to be '''neutralized'''.
 
An example from American English is the neutralization of the plosives {{IPA|/t, d/}} following a stressed syllable. Phonetically, both are realized in this position as {{IPA|[ɾ]}}, a voiced [[alveolar flap]]. This can be heard by comparing ''writer'' with ''rider'' (for the sake of simplicity, [[Canadian raising]] is not taken into account).
 
{| cellpadding="4"
| 
| 
| {{IPA|[ɻaɪˀt]}}
| ''write''
|-
| 
| 
| {{IPA|[ɻaɪd]}}
| ''ride''
|}
 
with the [[suffix (linguistics)|suffix]] ''er'':
 
{| cellpadding="4"
| 
| 
| {{IPA|['ɻaɪɾɚ]}}
| ''writer''
|
|-
| 
| 
| {{IPA|['ɻaɪɾɚ]}}
| ''rider''
|}
 
Thus, one cannot say whether the underlying representation of the intervocalic consonant in either word is {{IPA|/t/}} or {{IPA|/d/}} without looking at the unsuffixed form. This neutralization can be represented as an archiphoneme |D|, in which case the underlying representation of ''writer'' or ''rider'' would be |{{IPA|'ɻaɪDɚ}}|. 
 
Another way to talk about archiphonemes involves the concept of '''[[underspecification]]'''. Phonemes can be considered fully specified segments while archiphonemes are underspecified segments. In [[Tuvan language|Tuvan]], phonemic vowels are specified with the features of tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified high vowel where only the tongue height is specified.
 
{| cellpadding="4"
|-
| 
| 
! phoneme/<br>archiphoneme
! height
! backness
! roundedness
|-
| 
| 
| {{IPA|/i/}}
| high
| front
| unrounded
|-
| 
| 
| {{IPA|/ɯ/}}
| high
| back
| unrounded
|-
| 
| 
| {{IPA|/u/}}
| high
| back
| rounded
|-
| 
| 
| <nowiki>|U|</nowiki>
| high
| -
| -
|}
 
Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends on [[vowel harmony]]. If |U| occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be pronounced as the phoneme {{IPA|/i/}}; if following a back unrounded vowel, it will be as an {{IPA|/ɯ/}}; and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an {{IPA|/u/}}. This can been seen in the following words:
 
{| cellpadding="4"
|-
| 
| 
| <nowiki>-|Um|</nowiki>
|
|
| 'my'
|
| (the vowel of this suffix is underspecified)
|-
| 
| 
| <nowiki>|idikUm|</nowiki>
| →
| {{IPA|[idikim]}}
| 'my boot'
| 
| (/i/ is front & unrounded)
|-
| 
| 
| <nowiki>|xarUm|</nowiki>
| →
| {{IPA|[xarɯm]}}
| 'my snow'
| 
| (/a/ is back & unrounded)
|-
| 
| 
| <nowiki>|nomUm|</nowiki>
| →
| {{IPA|[nomum]}}
| 'my book'
| 
| (/o/ is back & rounded)
|}
 
Not all phonologists accept the concept of archiphonemes. Many doubt that it reflects how people process language or control speech, and some argue that archiphonemes add unnecessary complexity.
 
==Non-phonemes==
 
[[Prothesis (linguistics)|Prothesis]], [[epenthesis]] and [[paragoge]], due to [[phonotactics]], add sounds into words without adding meaning. Nevertheless, the sound is added, and thus the phoneme status may be ambiguous. For example, in Spanish a prothetic ''e-'' must be added before initial /s/ + consonant clusters, e.g. '''''e'''strés''.
 
==Phonological extremes==
Of all the sounds that a human vocal tract can create, different languages vary considerably in the number of these sounds that are considered to be distinctive phonemes in the speech of that language.  [[Ubyx language|Ubyx]] and [[Arrernte]] have only two phonemic vowels, while at the other extreme, the [[Bantu languages|Bantu language]] [[Ngwe language|Ngwe]] has fourteen vowel qualities, twelve of which may occur long or short, for twenty-six oral vowels, plus six nasalized vowels, long and short, for thirty-eight vowels; while [[!Xóõ language|!Xóõ]] achieves thirty-one pure vowels—not counting vowel length, which it also has—by varying the phonation. [[Rotokas language|Rotokas]] has only six consonants, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-seven, and Ubyx eighty-one. [[French language|French]] has no phonemic tone or stress, while several of the [[Tai-Kadai languages|Kam-Sui languages]] have nine tones, and one of the [[Kru languages]], [[Wobe language|Wobe]], has been claimed to have fourteen, though this is disputed. The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as eleven in Rotokas to as many as 112 in !Xóõ (including four tones). These may range from familiar sounds like {{IPA|[t]}}, {{IPA|[s]}}, or {{IPA|[m]}} to very unusual ones produced in extraordinary ways (see: [[Click consonant]], [[phonation]], [[airstream mechanism]]).  The [[English language]] itself uses a rather large set of thirteen to twenty-two vowels, including diphthongs, though its twenty-two to twenty-six consonants are close to average. (There are twenty-one consonant and five vowel ''letters'' in the English alphabet, but this does not correspond to the number of consonant and vowel ''sounds''.)
 
The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels {{IPA|/i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/}}. The most common consonants are {{IPA|/p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/}}.  A very few languages lack one of these: [[Arabic]] lacks {{IPA|/p/}}, [[Hawaiian language|standard Hawaiian]] lacks {{IPA|/t/}}, [[Mohawk language|Mohawk]] lacks {{IPA|/p/}} and {{IPA|/m/}}, Hupa lacks both {{IPA|/p/}} and a simple {{IPA|/k/}}, colloquial [[Samoan language|Samoan]] lacks {{IPA|/t/}} and {{IPA|/n/}}, while Rotokas and [[Chimakuan languages|Quileute]] lack {{IPA|/m/}} and {{IPA|/n/}}. While most of these languages have very small inventories, Quileute and Hupa have quite complex consonant systems.
 
==Writing systems==
At least in theory, in a phonemic writing system, a given symbol represents a single phoneme, and each phoneme is represented by a single symbol. This may differ from a phonetic orthography, which only requires that the spelling be unambiguously determined by the pronunciation, and the pronunciation unambiguously indicated by the spelling. Phonemic representation of a language is often described as 'broad transcription', while a phonetic rendering is called 'narrow'. A phonetic system would have more symbols or spelling conventions, since it might, in part, attempt to capture some key sound variations (allophones) of a phoneme. Learners of a foreign or second language can benefit from a more phonetic writing system if it reveals subtleties in pronunciation that are phonemically glossed over by literate native or fluent speakers of that language (since the latter's purpose is fluent reading). 
 
English spelling (whether British, American or Australian) is often cited as the classic example of a nonphonemic, and indeed unphonetic, spelling system. [[Welsh language|Welsh]] and [[Irish language|Irish]] are, by contrast, among the more predictable orthographies among languages using the Latin alphabet. In [[French language|French]], rules to predict pronunciation from spelling are quite simple and have few exceptions, as long as there are some clues such as context or part of speech, but guessing spelling from pronunciation is quite difficult, especially because of the many silent letters. Both written English and French (being lexical cousins, if quite different phonologically speaking) tend to preserve word root (over sound) relationships. [[Italian language|Italian]], [[Spanish language|Spanish]] and especially [[Finnish language|Finnish]] have a very close letter-to-phoneme correspondence. [[Karelian language|Karelian]] has a perfectly phonemic spelling system, as it has no [[standard language]], but it has a complete spelling system.
 
The relationship that [[Arabic language|Arabic]] has with its [[Arabic alphabet|writing system]] is the opposite of French, where a given pronunciation has an obvious spelling while the reverse is not generally true due to the tendency to omit diacritics that indicate short vowels([[Harakat]]) except in special cases such us religious texts and children's literature or when a word's meaning is ambiguous and can not be discerned from the context.
 
Other languages fall somewhere in between polar distinctions such as "lexical vs. phonemic and/or phonetic" and "phonemic vs. phonetic".  Although English is often given as an example of an unphonetic orthography, its system is nowhere near to being as logographic (lexical or word-based) a system as Chinese writing is.  English spelling conveys etymological, derivational and inflectional information, but also vast amounts of phonetic information as well. In a nutshell, written English displays a great deal of complexity for representing vowel sounds within a fairly stable and consistent consonant framework (though there is a shortage of letters all around, with 26 letters and phoneme counts well over 40). [[Spanish language|Spanish]] is often given as an example of a phonetic orthography, but it has numerous imperfections including [[silent letter]]s.  It is, at least, possible to tell the correct pronunciation of any written Spanish word. Another phonemic orthography is [[Serbian language|Serbian]]. Its phonemicity was established by Serbian "[[Noah Webster|Webster]]" [[Vuk Stefanović Karadžić]]. He followed a strict phonemic principle, which is best told by his own words: "Write as you speak and read as it is written.". [[Hindi language|Hindi]], a descendant of [[Sanskrit language|Sanskrit]], is an example of phonetically written language represented with a non-Roman Alphabet that is partly syllabic in nature. Hindi's writing system, however, probably ultimately descends from the same ancient Middle Eastern sources that gave the world the Roman, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts.
 
Real world distinctions between phonemic and nonphonemic orthographies are exaggerated. All languages are written with conventions that represent both meaning and pronunciation. This is true at both ends of the scale: Chinese characters are first and foremost symbols for morphemes and words, but they may have some phonetic elements to their composition as well (and these work, sometimes at least, the way spelling analogies do in written English). At the other extreme, there are a few orthographies which are complete and consistent phonemic representations of an artificial national standard. The phonemic principles by which orthographies might be standardized might also exclude representation of variations in pronunciation within the spoken dialects of a national language.
 
The Korean [[Hangul]] alphabet was used largely phonemically after its invention in the 15th century, but shifted to an almost perfectly [[morphophonemic]] writing system in more recent times. It is often noted as paying attention to phonetic detail and capturing the language analytically at a fine-tuned featural level, although modern orthography does not indicate vowel quantity (or pitch accent in some dialects), which until the 20th century was phonemically distinctive in the standard language. On the other hand, the orthography retains distinctions that have all but disappeared from many speakers' pronunciation &ndash; orthographies prior to 1933 did this even more than today.  They, for example, distinguished between ''dy'', ''jy'' and ''j'' before vowels on the basis of a word's etymology, even though all three were pronounced alike.
 
== See also ==
* [[Minimal pair]]
* [[Phone]]
* [[Phonology]]
* [[Emic and etic]]
* [[Tone (linguistics)]]
* [[Morphophonology]]
* [[List of phonetics topics]]
* [[Initial-stress-derived noun]]
* [[Viseme]]
 
== External links ==
 
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm What is a ''phoneme''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAllophone.htm What is an ''allophone''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhone.htm What is a ''phone''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneticallySimilarSegm.htm What is a ''phonetically similar segment''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMinimalPair.htm What is a ''minimal pair''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsComplementaryDistributio.htm What is ''complementary distribution''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnEnvironment.htm What is an ''environment''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsContrastInIdenticalEnvir.htm What is an ''contrast in identical environments''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsContrastInAnalogousEnvir.htm What is an ''contrast in analogous environments''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ComparisonOfMorphemeMorphAllom.htm Comparison of morpheme-morph-allomorph & phoneme-phone-allophone? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Phonology.htm What is ''phonology''? <small>(SIL)</small>]
* [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=phoneme Phoneme <small>(Lexicon of Linguistics)</small>]
* [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=allophony Allophony <small>(Lexicon of Linguistics)</small>]
* [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=transcription Transcription <small>(Lexicon of Linguistics)</small>]
* [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Grapheme-phoneme+conversion Grapheme-Phoneme Conversion <small>(Lexicon of Linguistics)</small>]
* [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Phoneme+restoration Phoneme Restoration <small>(Lexicon of Linguistics)</small>]
*[http://moodle.ed.uiuc.edu/wiked/index.php/Phonemic_awareness phonemic awareness]
 
[[Category:CZ Live]]
[[Category:Linguistics Workgroup]]

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A phoneme is a unit of natural language that can help distinguish one word from another as different meaningful units, such as /b/ versus /m/ in English bat and mat. It is often considered the smallest unit of language that can serve that distinguishing purpose, but others have been proposed. It is of interest in the subfield of linguistics called phonology. The English language is generally considered to have around 45 phonemes, but there is not full agreement about that number[1]. Indeed it varies between different varieties of English.

In spoken language, phonemes are regarded as the individual 'sounds' of the language, corresponding very roughly to the sounds of the letters of an alphabet—though a phoneme may also be in fact a small group of consecutive sounds.

The concept of the phoneme is used in understanding sign languages as well.

Limitations

The existence of phonemes is generally assumed in many fields of linguistics and education, but phonemes been rejected as a true unit of analysis in mainstream phonology since the publication of Chomsky and Halle's The Sound Pattern of English in 1968. The problem is, that meaning is often also inferred from context, so phonemes alone may not provide enough distinguishing information. Some tonal languages, for example, have units of meaning that depend on both tone and alphabet; yet written versions of the language may lack a notation for how people use tonality. That tends to be okay, because context may provide enough additional information for the hearers of tonal language to understand which of various possible intonation-distinguished meanings was intended.

The importance of context for phonemes was arguably proven well before Chomsky and Halle's study, due to the work of missionary John F. Carrington, the first European to realize how the "talking drums" in Africa could be used to communicate sophisticated messages (based on several African languages) over long distances, although they lacked the ability to articulate any vowel or consonant. Drummers used a combination of rhythm and tonality to suggest words to listeners, dependent on context. This was possible because of the importance of rhythm and tonality in the African languages behind the drumming. Carrington published a book about the talking drums in the 1940's[2]. Although the spoken languages used by the drummers also had consonant and vowel-based "phonemes", the vowels and consonants proved unnecessary for the transmission of simple messages, even including (sometimes) jokes[3].

Phonemes and other phonological segments

Phonemes are not the smallest level of sound classification. The sound inventory of a language is the set of phones of that language. However, phones do not distinguish meaning in themselves. What makes a phoneme a phoneme, rather than a phone, is that changing it to another phoneme may yield a different word. For instance, /mat/ ("mat") and /mad/ ("mad") are different words in English. They are distinguished by only one different phoneme: /t/ versus /d/ (put more specifically, it is the opposition between voiceless and a voiced dental plosive in the first versus the second word). This difference is called phonemic. In addition, word pairs such as "bat/mat" or "mat/mad" in English are called minimal pairs, because they are only distinguished by one phoneme.

On the other hand, the phoneme /t/ can be pronounced as one of several distinct phones ([t] (unaspirated) and [th] (aspirated t)), called the allophones of /t/. The choice of allophone depends on the context surrounding the /t/ and the phonological rules in the language ([th], for example, occurs initially in English stressed syllables, e.g. [ə.thæk] attack). As a result, changing between allophones (such as saying [tom] vs [thom]) would not yield a new word, as above, but instead would be a violation of the phonological constraints (phonotactics) of the language.

Experiments

The way individual phonemes are recognized in human speech can be examined by means of non-existing syllables which consist nevertheless of real phonemes, so-called logatomes.[4]

References

  1. ↑ "The Information" by James Gleich, Pantheon Books, 2011, pp 23-24. ISBN 978-9375423727
  2. ↑ The Talking Drums of Africa, by John F. Carrington, orig. Carey Kingsgate Press, 1949; online at "A Gateway for the Study of Christian Missions", last access 6/11/2021.
  3. ↑ "The Information" by James Gleich, Pantheon Books, 2011, pp 23-24. ISBN 978-9375423727
  4. ↑ http://medi.uni-oldenburg.de/ollo/

See also

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