What are phonemes?

jump to the info

THE ALPHABET LETTERS ARE NOT PHONEMES

First of all, we must realise that Letters of the Alphabet are NOT phonemes.

Letters in your alphabet might be phonemic, or even phonetic, but this is rare.

Even if your school, country, culture, government told you that your alphabet is phonetic, perfect, flawless!, usually this is not true. Sorry. It is best that you know the truth, otherwise you can't learn properly.

I have studied a range of languages, each with different alphabets and scripts, and I have yet to see a script that is perfectly self-consistent.

The closest I've seen are Vietnamese and Devanagari.

Also, no, your language does not include every sound of English. And it is unlikely that it contains every sound of any other language.

The most likely contender for being included entirely inside another language is Spanish, because it has only 21-23 phonemes.

There are so many variations on how to pronounce each phoneme on the IPA table that it is extremely unlikely that your native language includes identical pronunciations as those of English.

This is important to consider because if you look at IPA tables for different languages, they typically show simplified IPA symbols, so even if it looks like all phonemes of one language are within another language, they still probably aren't.

(For example, English "p" is listed as /p/, but it is actually /pʰ/ in most positions. Your language probably lists /p/ as well, but it is likely to be /p/ and not /pʰ/.)

Phones

We can divide pronunciation into tiny units called phones. No, not the telephone type.

Phone simply means sound.

And this is also related to the word phthongos from Ancient Greek, which means sound too.

Phonemes

However, if we consider every single tiniest sound unit as a separate sound, speech becomes unreasonably complicated.

Instead, we can group these phones into sets, which are called phonemes.

The concept of a phoneme is a group of sounds which all serve the same function, but sound different in different positions. A p at the beginning of a word sounds different to a p in the middle of a word and at the end of word. It also sounds different if there is an unvoiced friction sound before it inside the same word, like sp.

All of these variations are simply too many for the normal person to learn and practise — however, these sounds emerge automatically if you just focus on a couple of key instructions for each sound. These unique phones within each phoneme are known as allophones.

This is how we create the concept of a phoneme.

Word	Pronunciation	Definition
phone	/fəwn/	A unique unit of sound.
phoneme	/ˈfɔ.nɪjm/	A collection of phones which can be represented using a single IPA symbol.
allophone	/ˈa.lə.fəwn/	A phone within a phoneme.