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, and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are studied under phonology, a branch of linguistics.
Phonemes are often represented, when written, as a glyph enclosed within two forward-sloping slashes. For example, /k/ represents the phoneme or sound used at the beginning of the English-language word cat.

Examples and notation

The English words cell and set have the same sequence of sounds except for the final consonant: thus, versus in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is a writing system that can be used to represent phonemes. Since and alone distinguish certain words from others, they are examples of phonemes of English. Specifically they are consonant phonemes, along with the, while the is a vowel phoneme. Spelling does not always follow phonemes. For example, the English words knot, nut, and gnat all share the consonant phonemes and, differing only by their vowel phonemes:,, and, respectively. Similarly, is the notation for a sequence of four phonemes –,, and – that constitutes the vocalised word pushed.
Sounds that are perceived as phonemes vary by language and by dialect. For example, and are separate phonemes in English as they distinguish words like sin from words like sing, but they are a single phoneme in some languages, such as Spanish, in which and for instance are interpreted by Spanish speakers as merely regional or dialect-specific pronunciations of the same word. Such spoken variations of a single phoneme are known by linguists as allophones.
Linguists use slashes in the IPA to transcribe phonemes, and square brackets to transcribe more precise pronunciation details, including allophones; they describe this distinction as phonemic versus phonetic. Thus, the pronunciations of tap versus tab, or pat versus bat, can be represented phonemically and are written between slashes, while nuances of exactly how speakers pronounce are phonetic and written between brackets, such as for the p in spit versus for the p in pit, which in English is an aspirated allophone of /p/.

Conceptual basis; theory of the definition of phonemes

There are many views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. Generally, a phoneme is regarded as an abstraction of a set of spoken sound variations that are nevertheless perceived as a single basic unit of sound by the ordinary native speakers of a given language. While phonemes are considered abstracted, underlying representations for sound segments within words, the corresponding phonetic realizations of those phonemes—each phoneme with its various allophones—constitute the surface form that is actually uttered and heard. Allophones each have technically different articulations inside particular words or particular environments within words, yet these differences do not create any meaningful distinctions. Alternatively, at least one of those articulations could be feasibly used in all such words with these words still being recognized as such by users of the language. An example in American English is that the sound spelled with the symbol t is usually articulated with a glottal stop in the word cat, an alveolar flap in dating, an alveolar plosive in stick, and an aspirated alveolar plosive in tie; however, American English-speakers perceive or "hear" all of these sounds as merely being allophones of a single phoneme: the one traditionally represented in the IPA as.
For computer-typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA exist to represent IPA symbols using only ASCII characters. However, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. For languages whose writing systems employ the phonemic principle, ordinary letters may be used to denote phonemes, although this approach is often imperfect, as pronunciations naturally shift in a language over time, rendering previous spelling systems outdated or no longer closely representative of the sounds of the language.

Assignment of speech sounds to phonemes

A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, scat, skit. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects, the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in , the sound is aspirated, but in , it is unaspirated. The words, therefore, contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed for the aspirated form and for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other sounds would cause a change in meaning if substituted: for example, substitution of the sound would produce the different word still, and that sound must therefore be considered to represent a different phoneme.
The above shows that in English, and are allophones of a single phoneme. In some languages, however, and are perceived by native speakers as significantly different sounds, and substituting one for the other can change the meaning of a word. In those languages, therefore, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, in Icelandic, is the first sound of, meaning "cheerful", but is the first sound of, meaning "riddles". Icelandic, therefore, has two separate phonemes and.

Minimal pairs

A pair of words like kátur and gátur that differ only in one phone is called a minimal pair for the two alternative phones in question. The existence of minimal pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme.
To take another example, the minimal pair tip and dip illustrates that in English, and belong to separate phonemes, and ; since the words have different meanings, English-speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds.
Signed languages, such as American Sign Language, also have minimal pairs, differing only in one of the signs' parameters: handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and nonmanual signal or marker. A minimal pair may exist in the signed language if the basic sign stays the same, but one of the parameters changes.
However, the absence of minimal pairs for a given pair of phones does not always mean that they belong to the same phoneme: they may be so dissimilar phonetically that it is unlikely for speakers to perceive them as the same sound. For example, English has no minimal pair for the sounds and , and the fact that they can be shown to be in complementary distribution could be used to argue for their being allophones of the same phoneme. However, they are so dissimilar phonetically that they are considered separate phonemes. A case like this shows that sometimes it is the systemic distinctions and not the lexical context which are decisive in establishing phonemes. This implies that the phoneme should be defined as the smallest phonological unit which is contrastive at a lexical level or distinctive at a systemic level.
Phonologists have sometimes had recourse to "near minimal pairs" to show that speakers of the language perceive two sounds as significantly different even if no exact minimal pair exists in the lexicon. It is challenging to find a minimal pair to distinguish English from, yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are distinct phonemes. The two words 'pressure' and 'pleasure' can serve as a near minimal pair. The reason why this is still acceptable proof of phonemehood is that there is nothing about the additional difference that can be expected to somehow condition a voicing difference for a single underlying postalveolar fricative. One can, however, find true minimal pairs for /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ if less common words are considered. For example, 'Confucian' and 'confusion' are a valid minimal pair.

Suprasegmental phonemes

Besides segmental phonemes such as vowels and consonants, there are also suprasegmental features of pronunciation, which, in many languages, change the meaning of words and so are phonemic.
Phonemic stress is encountered in languages such as English. For example, there are two words spelled invite, one is a verb and is stressed on the second syllable, the other is a noun and stressed on the first syllable. The position of the stress distinguishes the words and so a full phonemic specification would include indication of the position of the stress: for the verb, for the noun. In other languages, such as French, word stress cannot have this function and so it is not phonemic.
Phonemic tones are found in languages such as Mandarin Chinese in which a given syllable can have five different tonal pronunciations:
Tone number12345
Hanzi媽麻馬罵嗎
Pinyinmāmámǎmàma
IPA
Glossmotherhemphorsescoldquestion particle

The tone "phonemes" in such languages are sometimes called tonemes. Languages such as English do not have phonemic tone, but they use intonation for functions such as emphasis and attitude.