Fonemien

Fonemien, or phonemes in English, are the smallest units of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning. They are abstract mental categories; a single fonem can have multiple concrete realizations, called allophones, depending on the phonetic context.

In a given language, phonemes contrast with each other. If replacing one sound with another changes the word's meaning, the two sounds belong to different phonemes. This contrastive distribution is usually demonstrated with minimal pairs, such as pat vs. bat in English.

The set of phonemes that a language uses is its phonemic inventory. This inventory is language specific; some languages have many vowels and consonants, others relatively few. Some languages also use phonemic tone, where pitch distinguishes word meaning, as in Mandarin.

Phonemes include both consonants and vowels; additional division exists for features such as length, stress, or tone in certain languages. For instance, vowel length can be phonemic in languages like Finnish or Japanese, and tone can be phonemic in many Asian and African languages.

Linguists study phonemes using phonology, while phonetics analyzes the concrete sounds (phones) and their physical properties. Phonemic analysis relies on the International Phonetic Alphabet to denote sounds and their abstract categories. Phonemes influence orthography, learned mappings between letters and sounds, and language acquisition.