phoneme

A phoneme is the most basic unit of a speech sound in a language. A speech sound must be distinct from other speech sounds to be considered a phoneme.

You can think of phonemes as the building blocks of spoken language. We make different words by combining different sounds, or phonemes, together.

In English, we have phonemes made from both consonants and vowels. For example, the word fan consists of three sounds, /f/ /a/ /n/, with the /f/ and /n/ being consonant sounds and /a/ being a vowel sound.

In written language, a phoneme can be represented by a single letter or multiple letters. For example, in the word rain, the a and i together represent the long /a/ sound. Go, bow, and though each use a different number of letters to represent the same /oh/ phoneme (o, ow, and ough).

The first records of the term phoneme come from around 1890. It ultimately comes from the Greek phṓnēma, meaning “sound.” Phonemes are distinct sounds that we use to indicate different words.

Phonemes are used to introduce languages to new learners. When you learned English, your teacher likely taught you about phonemes early on or used them to help you understand how we make words. Children are often taught phonemes to help them “sound out” words to make spelling and reading easier to master.

Every spoken language is made from phonemes, but the phonemes vary from language to language. Not every phoneme in one language exists in another. For example, the Spanish words caro (meaning “expensive”) and carro (meaning “car”) are separated by a difference in one phoneme. The “rolled r” phoneme in carro doesn’t exist in English and can often trip up English speakers new to learning Spanish.

Most linguists agree that the English language has at least 40 different phonemes. However, some argue that the exact number of English phonemes changes depending on a person’s accent and variety of English (British, American, Australian, etc.) a person uses.

This video demonstrates 44 phonemes used by American English speakers.

The concept of phonemes is important to teaching new learners of a language.

Phoneme-grapheme mapping helps students understand the relationship between speech sounds and print. #ccpsbest @cullmanprimary pic.twitter.com/OjO6Uw4Ovi

— Allison Bates (@Bates_CCPS) September 1, 2021

Early memory of the Russian language: learning not to confuse it with Portuguese (what I studied), despite similar phonemes.

— heathervescent (@heathervescent) August 15, 2017

• sound
• language
• speech
• spelling
• reading
• allophone
• phonetics
• accent

True or False?

Phonemes are distinct sounds that are used to indicate different meanings in words of a language.