Phoneme

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In linguistics and specifically phonology, a phoneme (/ˈfoʊniːm/) is any set of similar phones (speech sounds) that, within a given language, is perceptually regarded as a single distinct sound and helps distinguish one word from another.^[1]

The words cell and set have the exact same sequence of sounds, except for being distinguished by their final consonant sounds: /sɛl/ versus /sɛt/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Thus, in English, /l/ and /t/ are each phonemes. Specifically they are consonant phonemes, along with /s/, while /ɛ/ is a vowel phoneme. English's spelling does not strictly conform to its phonemes, so that the words knot /nɒt/, nut /nʌt/, and gnat /næt/, regardless of their spelling, all share the consonant phonemes /n/ and /t/, differing only by their vowel phonemes: /ɒ/, /ʌ/, and /æ/.

The sounds that are perceived as phonemes differ between languages, so that [n] or [ŋ] are separate phonemes in English (distinguishing words like sin from sing), but they constitute a single phoneme in Spanish, in which [pan] and [paŋ], for instance, are merely interpreted as regional or dialect-specific ways of pronouncing the same word (pan: the Spanish word for "bread"). Such spoken variations on a single phoneme, like in the Spanish example, are known by linguists as allophones. In the IPA, linguists use slashes to transcribe phonemes but square brackets to transcribe more precise pronunciation details, including allophones; they describe this basic distinction as phonemic versus phonetic. Thus, the pronunciation patterns of tap versus tab, or pat versus bat, can be transcribed phonemically and are written between slashes (including /p/, /b/, etc.), while nuances of exactly how a speaker pronounces /p/ are phonetic and written between brackets, such as [p] (for the p in spit) versus [pʰ] (for the p in pit, which in English is an aspirated allophone of /p/: pronounced with an extra burst of air).

There are various views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. Generally, a phoneme is regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of spoken sound variations (phones) that are nevertheless perceived as a single unit, a single sound, by the ordinary native speakers of a given language. For example, in American English, the sound spelled with the symbol t is usually articulated with: a glottal stop [ʔ] (or a similar glottalized sound) in the word cat, an alveolar flap [ɾ] in dating, an alveolar plosive [t] in stick, and an aspirated alveolar plosive [tʰ] in tie; however, English speakers perceive or "hear" all of these sounds as merely being variants (allophones) of a single phoneme that is traditionally transcribed as /t/. Allophones each have technically different articulations, yet their differences do not create meaningful distinctions between words. Phonemes are often considered to constitute an abstract underlying representation for segments of words, while speech sounds make up the corresponding phonetic realization, or the surface form that is actually uttered and heard.