Phoneminventar

Phoneminventar, or phoneme inventory, is a fundamental concept in linguistics that describes the set of phonemes a language uses to distinguish meaning. A phoneme is an abstract sound category whose actual realization can vary as allophones, but which contrasts with other sounds in the language. The phoneminventar therefore comprises the language’s contrastive sounds, usually divided into consonants and vowels. Some analyses also consider tonal or length contrasts as part of the inventory when they function phonemically in a language.

Determining the inventory involves analyzing how sounds function in contrastive contexts. Linguists use methods such as examining minimal pairs, studying distribution and phonotactic rules, and comparing dialects or historical stages. Because real speech includes allophones and contextual variation, the phonemic inventory aims to capture only those sounds that can distinguish words, not every heard variant. Borrowings, sociolinguistic change, and dialectal differences can alter the size and composition of a phoneminventar over time.

Phoneminventar vs phonetic inventory: the phonemic inventory lists the contrastive units that matter for meaning, while the phonetic inventory lists all phones that occur in actual speech, including non-contrastive realizations. Knowledge of the inventory informs phonology, orthography design, language documentation, and technologies such as speech recognition and synthesis. Documentation of a language’s phoneminventar is often a first step in broader linguistic analysis.