Phonem

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning. It is an abstract mental representation used by speakers to distinguish words, rather than a concrete sound that occurs in isolation. Phonemes are the building blocks of a language’s sound system, and different languages have different inventories of phonemes.

Phonemes are studied in contrast with phonetic realizations called allophones. Allophones are the actual sounds that can occur in speech without changing word meaning, depending on context. When two sounds can distinguish meaning in the same environment, they are considered distinct phonemes. For example, the sounds written as p and b are different phonemes in English because they create different words like “pat” and “bat.” In many cases, a single phoneme has multiple allophones, such as the aspirated and unaspirated variants of /p/ in English.

Phonology analyzes which sounds are phonemes in a language and how they combine. Phonemic inventories describe the set of phonemes a language uses, while phonotactics describes permissible combinations and sequences. Orthography (spelling) does not always map directly to phonemes, since letters or digraphs can represent multiple phonemes, and a single phoneme may be written in different ways.

Some languages use phonemic tones, where pitch distinguishes word meaning, adding another dimension to the phoneme system. Phonology, the study of phonemes, interacts with morphology, syntax, and semantics to explain how sound systems shape linguistic meaning.

The concept of the phoneme emerged in late 19th to early 20th-century linguistics and remains central to understanding how languages organize sound.