phonemics

Phonemics is the branch of linguistics that studies contrastive sound units, or phonemes, in a language. It focuses on how sounds distinguish meaning rather than how they are produced.

Phonetics documents actual articulation and acoustics. Phonemics asks which sounds are treated as the same unit in the mental grammar and which distinctions affect meaning. A phoneme is an abstract category; surface realizations are allophones.

Phoneme identification relies on contrastive distribution and minimal pairs. If replacing one sound with another changes meaning, they belong to different phonemes in that language. For example, English “pat” and “bat” show /p/ and /b/ as separate phonemes. Orthography often diverges from phonology.

Allophones are predictable variants of a phoneme; their distribution is constrained by phonotactics. The choice of allophone depends on context. This lets a phonological description compress many pronunciations into a smaller set of phonemes.

Phonemics appears in linguistic description, language documentation, and teaching. It intersects with phonology, morphology, and semantics. The concept originated with Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and was developed by the Prague School, including Trubetzkoy and Jakobson.

In practice, phonemic analyses use broad inventories and rules that generate allophonic realizations. Phonemic transcription uses slashes, while narrow transcription uses brackets to show detail.