What is a phoneme?

Phonetics And Word Formation Questions Medium



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What is a phoneme?

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another. It is a basic unit of phonetics and is used to study the sound patterns and structures of languages. Phonemes are abstract representations of sounds and are not tied to any specific language or writing system. They are classified based on their distinctive features, such as place and manner of articulation, voicing, and nasalization. For example, in English, the sounds /p/ and /b/ are considered separate phonemes because they can differentiate words like "pat" and "bat."