fonemik

Fonemik, or phonemics, is a branch of linguistics that studies phonemes—the abstract, mental units that distinguish meaning in a language. Unlike phonetics, which describes the physical realization of sounds and their articulation, fonemik focuses on the systematic organization of sound contrasts and how these contrasts encode lexical or grammatical distinctions.

Core concepts include phonemes and allophones. A phoneme is the smallest unit capable of changing meaning; its concrete realizations are allophones, which do not change meaning in predictable contexts. Phonemic analysis identifies which sounds are phonemic by examining contrastive distribution through minimal pairs—words that differ in only one sound and have different meanings, such as pat vs. bat, which shows /p/ and /b/ as separate phonemes. Allophones appear in predictable environments, such as the aspirated vs. unaspirated realizations of /p/ in pin and spin, which are variants of the same phoneme.

Notation typically uses slashes / / to mark phonemes and brackets [ ] for phones or allophonic realizations. Phonemic transcription omits non-contrastive detail, concentrating on contrasts relevant to meaning.

Applications of fonemik include language description and documentation, cross-language comparison, orthography design, language teaching, and speech technology. It underpins phonology—the study of the sound system—by modeling how phonemes interact, map to underlying representations, and give rise to phonotactic patterns and phonological rules.