Fonemet

Fonemet, in linguistics, is the smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning. It is an abstract mental category rather than a concrete sound; the actual sounds realized in speech are called allophones of that phoneme. The term fonemet is used in Turkish to refer to the same concept as the English phoneme.

Phonemes are identified by contrastive distribution: if replacing one sound with another changes the word’s meaning, the two sounds belong to different phonemes. The pair pat vs bat shows the contrast between /p/ and /b/ in English.

Within a language, several phonemes form its phonemic inventory, including consonants and vowels. The surface realizations of a phoneme are its allophones; for example, the English /t/ can be aspirated or unreleased depending on position and context, without changing the underlying phoneme.

Transcription: Linguists distinguish phonemes with slashes /.../ and phonetic values with brackets [...]. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is commonly used to represent both phonemes and allophones. Phonology studies how phonemes combine and interact, including processes like assimilation, insertion, deletion, and tone in some languages. Phonotactics describes permissible sequences of phonemes in a language.

Languages vary in size and composition of phoneme inventories, and the system can change over time through sound change, borrowing, and dialectal variation. Phonemes play a central role in distinguishing lexical items and shaping prosody and rhythm.