Phoneme
Encyclopedia
In a language or dialect, a phoneme (from the , phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is the smallest segmental
unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.
Thus a phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example of a phoneme is the /k/ sound in the words kit and skill. (In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes, as here.) Although most native English speakers don't notice this, in most English dialects, the /k/ sounds in these two words are actually pronounced differently: they are different speech sounds, or phones (which, in transcription, are placed in square brackets). In our example, the /k/ in kit is aspirated
, [kʰ], while the /k/ in skill is unaspirated. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme in English because, if an English speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other phonemes could be substituted (creating a minimal pair) which would cause a change in meaning: producing words like still (substituting /t/), spill (substituting /p/) and swill (substituting /w/). These other sounds (/t/, /p/ and /w/) are, in English, different phonemes.
In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are different phonemes, and are perceived as such by the speakers of those languages. For example, in Icelandic, /kʰ/ is the first sound of kátur meaning 'cheerful', while /k/ is the first sound of gátur meaning 'riddles'. The fact that these two different words have different meanings which can be readily identified by speakers of Icelandic tells us that Icelandic speakers perceive the sounds as different phonemes.
Phones that belong to the same phoneme, such as [t] and [tʰ] for English /t/, are called allophone
s. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones of the same phoneme or separate phonemes relies on finding minimal pair
s: words that differ by only the phone in question. For example, the words tip and dip illustrate that in English [t] and [d] are separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/, in English: the two words have different meanings that are readily recognizable, meaning that English speakers can readily distinguish between the two sounds. In other languages, though, including Korean; there are no such pairs available. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing /t/ and /d/ in Korean indicates that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/. (/tʰata/ is pronounced [tʰada], for example. That is, when they hear this one word, Korean speakers perceive the same sound in both the beginning and middle of the word, whereas an English speaker would perceive different sounds in these two locations.)
Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson
, Morris Halle
, and Noam Chomsky
) consider phonemes to be further decomposable into feature
s, such features being the true minimal constituents of language. Features overlap each other in time, as do suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be designated as acoustic
(Jakobson) or articulatory
(Halle & Chomsky) in nature.
in 1873, but it referred only to a speech sound. The term phoneme as an abstraction
was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875–1895. The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics. The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and others of the Prague School (during the years 1926–1935), and in those of structuralist
s like Ferdinand de Saussure
, Edward Sapir
, and Leonard Bloomfield
.
Some structuralists wished to eliminate a cognitive or psycholinguistic function for the phoneme.
Later, it was also used in generative linguistics
, most famously by Noam Chomsky
and Morris Halle
, and remains central to many accounts of the development of modern phonology
. As a theoretical concept or model, though, it has been supplemented and even replaced by others.
In some languages, the term chroneme
may be used for contrastive length or duration of phonemes. In languages in which tones
are phonemic, the tone phonemes may be called tonemes. Not all scholars working on such languages use these terms.
The distinction between phonetic and phonemic systems gave rise of Kenneth Pike's concepts of Emic and etic
description.
s in particular) , pronunciations that correspond to the canonical alphabet pronunciations are called alphaphonemic. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that each enclosed symbol is claimed to be phonemically meaningful. On the other hand, a transcription that indicates finer detail, including allophonic variation like the two English L's, is said to be phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, [ ].
The common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) (/ /) around the symbol that stands for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme for the initial consonant in the word "phoneme" would be written as /f/. In other words, the graphemes are <ph>, but this digraph represents one sound /f/. Allophone
s, more phonetically specific descriptions of how a given phoneme might be commonly instantiated, are often denoted in linguistics by the use of diacritical or other marks added to the phoneme symbols and then placed in square brackets ([ ]) to differentiate them from the phoneme in slant brackets (/ /). The conventions of orthography
are then kept separate from both phonemes and allophones by the use of angle brackets < > to enclose the spelling.
The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA) and extended sets adapted to a particular language are often used by linguists to write phonemes of oral languages, with the principle being one symbol equals one categorical sound. Due to problems displaying some symbols in the early days of the Internet, systems such as X-SAMPA
and Kirshenbaum
were developed to represent IPA symbols in plain text. As of 2004, any modern web browser
can display IPA symbols (as long as the operating system
provides the appropriate fonts), and we use this system in this article.
Usually, long vowel
s and consonant
s are represented either by a length indicator or doubling of the symbol in question.
include consonant plosives like /p/ and /b/. These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. These phonemes, however, might not be so apparent in written English, for example when they are typically represented by a group of more than one letter, called a digraph
, like <sh> or <ch> .
For a list of the phonemes in the English language, see IPA for English.
Two sounds which are allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, /p/ has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones: aspirated as in /pɪn/, and non-aspirated as in /spɪn/. However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated /pʰ/ is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated /p/. As another example, there is no distinction between [r] and [l] in Japanese
: there is only one /r/ phoneme, though it has various allophones that can sound more like [l], [ɾ], or [r] to English speakers. The sounds [z] and [s] are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish
. The sounds [n] (as in run) and [ŋ] (as in rung) are also sometimes considered phonemes in English, but allophones in Italian
and Spanish
.
An important phoneme is the chroneme
, a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration of a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish
or Japanese allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Australian English
use it after only one (in this case, vowels).
, as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many other languages, such as Swahili
or Thai, /ŋ/ can appear word-initially). occurs only before vowels and at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a few languages, such as Arabic
, or Romanian
allow /h/ syllable-finally).
The notion of biuniqueness was controversial among some pre-generative linguists and was prominently challenged by Morris Halle
and Noam Chomsky
in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The unworkable aspects of the concept soon become apparent if you consider the phenomenon of flapping in North American English
. In the right environment, this flapping can change either /t/ or /d/ into the allophone [ɾ] for many affected speakers. Here, one allophone is clearly assigned to two phonemes.
In English there are three nasal phonemes, /m, n, ŋ/, as shown by the minimal triplet,
With rare exceptions, these phonemes are not contrastive before plosives such as /p, t, k/ within the same morpheme
. Although all three phones appear before plosives, for example in limp, lint, link ( /limp/, /lint/, /liŋk/), only one of these may appear before each of the plosives. That is, the /m, n, ŋ/ distinction is neutralized before each of the plosives /p, t, k/:
Thus these phonemes are not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists, there is no evidence as to what the underlying representation
might be. If one hypothesizes that one is dealing with only a single underlying nasal, there is no reason to pick one of the three phonemes /m, n, ŋ/ over the other two.
(In some languages there is only one phonemic nasal anywhere, and due to obligatory assimilation, it surfaces as [m, n, ŋ] in just these environments, so this idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.)
In certain schools of phonology, such a neutralized distinction is known as an archiphoneme (Nikolai Trubetzkoy
of the Prague school is often associated with this analysis). Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter. Following this convention, the neutralization of /m, n, ŋ/ before /p, t, k/ could be notated as |N|, and limp, lint, link would be represented as |lɪNp, lɪNt, lɪNk|. (The |pipes| indicate underlying representation.) Other ways this archiphoneme could be notated are, {m, n, ŋ}, or |n*|.
Another example from American English is the neutralization of the plosives /t, d/ following a stressed syllable. Phonetically, both are realized in this position as [ɾ], a voiced alveolar flap. This can be heard by comparing betting with bedding.
with the suffix -ing:
Thus, one cannot say whether the underlying representation of the intervocalic consonant in either word is /t/ or /d/ without looking at the unsuffixed form. This neutralization can be represented as an archiphoneme |D|, in which case the underlying representation of betting or bedding could be |ˈbɛDɪŋ|.
Another way to talk about archiphonemes involves the concept of underspecification
: phonemes can be considered fully specified segments while archiphonemes are underspecified segments. In Tuvan
, phonemic vowels are specified with the articulatory features of tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified high vowel where only the tongue height is specified.
Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends on vowel harmony
. If |U| occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be pronounced as the phoneme /i/; if following a back unrounded vowel, it will be as an /ɯ/; and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an /u/. This can be seen in the following words:
s, the basic elements of gesture and location were formerly called cheremes (or cheiremes), but general usage changed to phoneme. Tonic
phonemes are sometimes called tonemes, and timing phonemes chronemes.
In sign languages, phonemes may be classified as Tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), Dez (the hand shape, from designator), Sig (the motion, from signation), and with some researchers, Ori (orientation). Facial expressions and mouthing are also phonemic.
There is one published set of phonemic symbols for sign language, the Stokoe notation
, used for linguistic research and originally developed for American Sign Language
. Stokoe notation has since been applied to British Sign Language
by Kyle and Woll, and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages
by Adam Kendon. Other sign notations, such as the Hamburg Notation System
and SignWriting
, are phonetic scripts capable of writing any sign language. However, because they are not constrained by phonology, they do not yield a specific spelling for a sign. The SignWriting form, for example, will be different depending on whether the signer is left or right-handed, despite the fact this makes no difference to the meaning of the sign.
Ngwe
has 14 vowel qualities, 12 of which may occur long or short, making 26 oral vowels, plus 6 nasalized vowels, long and short, making a total of 38 vowels; while !Xóõ
achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation
. Rotokas
has only six consonants, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of 77, and Ubyx
81. French
has no phonemic tone or stress, while several of the Kam–Sui languages
have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages
, Wobe
, has been claimed to have 14, though this is disputed. The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as eleven in Rotokas
to as many as 112 in !Xóõ (including four tones). The English language
uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowels, including diphthongs, though its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average. (There are 21 consonant and five vowel letters in the English alphabet, but this does not correspond to the number of consonant and vowel sounds.)
The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. The most common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/. Very few languages lack any of these: Arabic lacks /p/, standard Hawaiian
lacks /t/, Mohawk
and Tlingit
lack /p/ and /m/, Hupa
lacks both /p/ and a simple /k/, colloquial Samoan
lacks /t/ and /n/, while Rotokas
and Quileute
lack /m/ and /n/.
Segment (linguistics)
In linguistics , the term segment may be defined as "any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech."- Classifying speech units :...
unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.
Thus a phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example of a phoneme is the /k/ sound in the words kit and skill. (In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes, as here.) Although most native English speakers don't notice this, in most English dialects, the /k/ sounds in these two words are actually pronounced differently: they are different speech sounds, or phones (which, in transcription, are placed in square brackets). In our example, the /k/ in kit is aspirated
Aspiration (phonetics)
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ...
, [kʰ], while the /k/ in skill is unaspirated. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme in English because, if an English speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other phonemes could be substituted (creating a minimal pair) which would cause a change in meaning: producing words like still (substituting /t/), spill (substituting /p/) and swill (substituting /w/). These other sounds (/t/, /p/ and /w/) are, in English, different phonemes.
In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are different phonemes, and are perceived as such by the speakers of those languages. For example, in Icelandic, /kʰ/ is the first sound of kátur meaning 'cheerful', while /k/ is the first sound of gátur meaning 'riddles'. The fact that these two different words have different meanings which can be readily identified by speakers of Icelandic tells us that Icelandic speakers perceive the sounds as different phonemes.
Phones that belong to the same phoneme, such as [t] and [tʰ] for English /t/, are called allophone
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
s. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones of the same phoneme or separate phonemes relies on finding minimal pair
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
s: words that differ by only the phone in question. For example, the words tip and dip illustrate that in English [t] and [d] are separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/, in English: the two words have different meanings that are readily recognizable, meaning that English speakers can readily distinguish between the two sounds. In other languages, though, including Korean; there are no such pairs available. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing /t/ and /d/ in Korean indicates that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/. (/tʰata/ is pronounced [tʰada], for example. That is, when they hear this one word, Korean speakers perceive the same sound in both the beginning and middle of the word, whereas an English speaker would perceive different sounds in these two locations.)
Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
, Morris Halle
Morris Halle
Morris Halle , is a Latvian-American Jewish linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
, and Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
) consider phonemes to be further decomposable into feature
Distinctive feature
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that may be analyzed in phonological theory.Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segments they describe: major class features, laryngeal features, manner features,...
s, such features being the true minimal constituents of language. Features overlap each other in time, as do suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be designated as acoustic
Acoustic phonetics
Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum, and the relationship...
(Jakobson) or articulatory
Articulatory phonetics
The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures....
(Halle & Chomsky) in nature.
Background and related ideas
The term phonème was reportedly first used by A. Dufriche-DesgenettesA. Dufriche-Desgenettes
Antoni Dufriche-Desgenettes was a French merchant, ethnographer, poet, and linguist, known for the introduction of the notion of phoneme. Being an autodidact in linguistics, he was not well received by his French colleagues, despite being a founding member of the Paris Linguistic Society, and has...
in 1873, but it referred only to a speech sound. The term phoneme as an abstraction
Abstraction
Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875–1895. The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics. The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and others of the Prague School (during the years 1926–1935), and in those of structuralist
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
s like Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
, Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics....
, and Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics...
.
Some structuralists wished to eliminate a cognitive or psycholinguistic function for the phoneme.
Later, it was also used in generative linguistics
Generative linguistics
Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping,...
, most famously by Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
and Morris Halle
Morris Halle
Morris Halle , is a Latvian-American Jewish linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
, and remains central to many accounts of the development of modern phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
. As a theoretical concept or model, though, it has been supplemented and even replaced by others.
In some languages, the term chroneme
Chroneme
In linguistics, a chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant. The noun chroneme is derived from Greek χρονος , and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous to the -eme in phoneme...
may be used for contrastive length or duration of phonemes. In languages in which tones
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
are phonemic, the tone phonemes may be called tonemes. Not all scholars working on such languages use these terms.
The distinction between phonetic and phonemic systems gave rise of Kenneth Pike's concepts of Emic and etic
Emic and etic
Emic and etic are terms used by anthropologists and by others in the social and behavioral sciences to refer to two kinds of data concerning human behavior...
description.
Notation
A transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a language is said to be phonemic. In languages that are morphophonemic (vowelVowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s in particular) , pronunciations that correspond to the canonical alphabet pronunciations are called alphaphonemic. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that each enclosed symbol is claimed to be phonemically meaningful. On the other hand, a transcription that indicates finer detail, including allophonic variation like the two English L's, is said to be phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, [ ].
The common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) (/ /) around the symbol that stands for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme for the initial consonant in the word "phoneme" would be written as /f/. In other words, the graphemes are <ph>, but this digraph represents one sound /f/. Allophone
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
s, more phonetically specific descriptions of how a given phoneme might be commonly instantiated, are often denoted in linguistics by the use of diacritical or other marks added to the phoneme symbols and then placed in square brackets ([ ]) to differentiate them from the phoneme in slant brackets (/ /). The conventions of orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
are then kept separate from both phonemes and allophones by the use of angle brackets < > to enclose the spelling.
The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
(IPA) and extended sets adapted to a particular language are often used by linguists to write phonemes of oral languages, with the principle being one symbol equals one categorical sound. Due to problems displaying some symbols in the early days of the Internet, systems such as X-SAMPA
X-SAMPA
The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the...
and Kirshenbaum
Kirshenbaum
Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA, is a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet in ASCII. This way it allows typewriting IPA-symbols by regular keyboard. It was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english...
were developed to represent IPA symbols in plain text. As of 2004, any modern web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
can display IPA symbols (as long as the operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
provides the appropriate fonts), and we use this system in this article.
Usually, long vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s and consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
s are represented either by a length indicator or doubling of the symbol in question.
Examples
Examples of phonemes in the English languageEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
include consonant plosives like /p/ and /b/. These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. These phonemes, however, might not be so apparent in written English, for example when they are typically represented by a group of more than one letter, called a digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
, like <sh> or <ch> .
For a list of the phonemes in the English language, see IPA for English.
Two sounds which are allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, /p/ has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones: aspirated as in /pɪn/, and non-aspirated as in /spɪn/. However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated /pʰ/ is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated /p/. As another example, there is no distinction between [r] and [l] in Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
: there is only one /r/ phoneme, though it has various allophones that can sound more like [l], [ɾ], or [r] to English speakers. The sounds [z] and [s] are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
. The sounds [n] (as in run) and [ŋ] (as in rung) are also sometimes considered phonemes in English, but allophones in Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
and Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
.
An important phoneme is the chroneme
Chroneme
In linguistics, a chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant. The noun chroneme is derived from Greek χρονος , and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous to the -eme in phoneme...
, a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration of a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
or Japanese allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Australian English
Australian English phonology
Australian English is a non-rhotic variety of English spoken by most native-born Australians. Phonologically, it is one of the most regionally homogeneous language varieties in the world...
use it after only one (in this case, vowels).
Restricted phonemes
A restricted phoneme is a phoneme that can only occur in a certain environment: There are restrictions as to where it can occur. English has several restricted phonemes:, as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many other languages, such as Swahili
Swahili language
Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
or Thai, /ŋ/ can appear word-initially). occurs only before vowels and at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a few languages, such as Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, or Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
allow /h/ syllable-finally).
- In many American dialects with the cot–caught merger, /ɔ/ occurs only before /r/, /l/, and in the diphthongDiphthongA diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
/ɔɪ/. - In non-rhotic dialectsRhotic and non-rhotic accentsEnglish pronunciation can be divided into two main accent groups: a rhotic speaker pronounces a rhotic consonant in words like hard; a non-rhotic speaker does not...
, /r/ can only occur before a vowel, never at the end of a word or before a consonant. - Under most interpretations, /w/ and /j/ occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable. However, many phonologists interpret a word like boy as either /bɔɪ/ or /bɔj/.
Biuniqueness
Biuniqueness is a property of the phoneme in classic structuralist phonemics. The biuniqueness definition states that every phonetic allophone must unambiguously be assigned to one and only one phoneme. In other words, there is a many-to-one allophone-to-phoneme mapping instead of a many-to-many mapping.The notion of biuniqueness was controversial among some pre-generative linguists and was prominently challenged by Morris Halle
Morris Halle
Morris Halle , is a Latvian-American Jewish linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
and Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The unworkable aspects of the concept soon become apparent if you consider the phenomenon of flapping in North American English
North American English
North American English is the variety of the English language of North America, including that of the United States and Canada. Because of their shared histories and the similarities between the pronunciation, vocabulary and accent of American English and Canadian English, the two spoken languages...
. In the right environment, this flapping can change either /t/ or /d/ into the allophone [ɾ] for many affected speakers. Here, one allophone is clearly assigned to two phonemes.
Neutralization, archiphoneme, and underspecification
Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they don't contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized.In English there are three nasal phonemes, /m, n, ŋ/, as shown by the minimal triplet,
| /sʌm/ | sum |
| /sʌn/ | sun |
| /sʌŋ/ | sung |
With rare exceptions, these phonemes are not contrastive before plosives such as /p, t, k/ within the same morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
. Although all three phones appear before plosives, for example in limp, lint, link ( /limp/, /lint/, /liŋk/), only one of these may appear before each of the plosives. That is, the /m, n, ŋ/ distinction is neutralized before each of the plosives /p, t, k/:
- only /m/ occurs before /p/,
- only /n/ before /t/, and
- only /ŋ/ before /k/.
Thus these phonemes are not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists, there is no evidence as to what the underlying representation
Underlying representation
In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology, the underlying representation or underlying form of a word or morpheme is the abstract form the word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have applied to it. If more rules apply to the same form, they can apply...
might be. If one hypothesizes that one is dealing with only a single underlying nasal, there is no reason to pick one of the three phonemes /m, n, ŋ/ over the other two.
(In some languages there is only one phonemic nasal anywhere, and due to obligatory assimilation, it surfaces as [m, n, ŋ] in just these environments, so this idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.)
In certain schools of phonology, such a neutralized distinction is known as an archiphoneme (Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology...
of the Prague school is often associated with this analysis). Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter. Following this convention, the neutralization of /m, n, ŋ/ before /p, t, k/ could be notated as |N|, and limp, lint, link would be represented as |lɪNp, lɪNt, lɪNk|. (The |pipes| indicate underlying representation.) Other ways this archiphoneme could be notated are
Another example from American English is the neutralization of the plosives /t, d/ following a stressed syllable. Phonetically, both are realized in this position as [ɾ], a voiced alveolar flap. This can be heard by comparing betting with bedding.
| [bɛt] | bet |
| [bɛd] | bed |
with the suffix -ing:
| [ˈbɛɾɪŋ] | betting |
| [ˈbɛɾɪŋ] | bedding |
Thus, one cannot say whether the underlying representation of the intervocalic consonant in either word is /t/ or /d/ without looking at the unsuffixed form. This neutralization can be represented as an archiphoneme |D|, in which case the underlying representation of betting or bedding could be |ˈbɛDɪŋ|.
Another way to talk about archiphonemes involves the concept of underspecification
Underspecification
In theoretical linguistics, underspecification is a phenomenon in which certain features are omitted in underlying representations. Restricted underspecification theory holds that features should only be underspecified if their values are predictable. For example, in English, all front vowels are...
: phonemes can be considered fully specified segments while archiphonemes are underspecified segments. In Tuvan
Tuvan language
Tuvan , also known as Tuvinian, Tyvan or Tuvin, is a Turkic language spoken in the Republic of Tuva in south-central Siberia in Russia. The language has borrowed a great number of roots from the Mongolian language and more recently from the Russian language...
, phonemic vowels are specified with the articulatory features of tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified high vowel where only the tongue height is specified.
| phoneme/ archiphoneme |
height | backness | roundedness |
|---|---|---|---|
| /i/ | high | front | unrounded |
| /ɯ/ | high | back | unrounded |
| /u/ | high | back | rounded |
| >U| | high |
Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends on vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
. If |U| occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be pronounced as the phoneme /i/; if following a back unrounded vowel, it will be as an /ɯ/; and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an /u/. This can be seen in the following words:
| ->Um| | 'my' | (the vowel of this suffix is underspecified) | ||
| >idikUm| | → | [idikim] | 'my boot' | (/i/ is front and unrounded) |
| >xarUm| | → | [xarɯm] | 'my snow' | (/a/ is back and unrounded) |
| >nomUm| | → | [nomum] | 'my book' | (/o/ is back and rounded) |
Minimal contrastive units in sign languages
In sign languageSign language
A sign language is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's...
s, the basic elements of gesture and location were formerly called cheremes (or cheiremes), but general usage changed to phoneme. Tonic
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
phonemes are sometimes called tonemes, and timing phonemes chronemes.
In sign languages, phonemes may be classified as Tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), Dez (the hand shape, from designator), Sig (the motion, from signation), and with some researchers, Ori (orientation). Facial expressions and mouthing are also phonemic.
There is one published set of phonemic symbols for sign language, the Stokoe notation
Stokoe notation
Stokoe notation is the first phonemic script used for sign languages. It was created by William Stokoe for American Sign Language , with Latin letters and numerals used for the shapes they have in fingerspelling, and iconic glyphs to transcribe the position, movement, and orientation of the hands...
, used for linguistic research and originally developed for American Sign Language
American Sign Language
American Sign Language, or ASL, for a time also called Ameslan, is the dominant sign language of Deaf Americans, including deaf communities in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico...
. Stokoe notation has since been applied to British Sign Language
British Sign Language
British Sign Language is the sign language used in the United Kingdom , and is the first or preferred language of some deaf people in the UK; there are 125,000 deaf adults in the UK who use BSL plus an estimated 20,000 children. The language makes use of space and involves movement of the hands,...
by Kyle and Woll, and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages
Australian Aboriginal sign languages
Many Australian Aboriginal cultures have or traditionally had a manually coded language, a sign-language counterpart of their spoken language. This appears to be connected with various speech taboos between certain kin or at particular times, such as during a mourning period for women or during...
by Adam Kendon. Other sign notations, such as the Hamburg Notation System
Hamburg Notation System
The Hamburg Sign Language Notation System, or HamNoSys, is a phonetic transcription system for sign languages, analogous to the IPA for spoken languages. First developed in 1985 at the University of Hamburg, Germany, it is currently in its third revision....
and SignWriting
SignWriting
SignWriting is a system of writing sign languages. It is highly featural and visually iconic, both in the shapes of the characters, which are abstract pictures of the hands, face, and body, and in their spatial arrangement on the page, which does not follow a sequential order like the letters that...
, are phonetic scripts capable of writing any sign language. However, because they are not constrained by phonology, they do not yield a specific spelling for a sign. The SignWriting form, for example, will be different depending on whether the signer is left or right-handed, despite the fact this makes no difference to the meaning of the sign.
Phonological extremes
Of all the phonemes human vocal folds can produce, different languages vary considerably in the number of these sounds that are considered to be distinctive phonemes in the speech of that language. Ubyx and Arrernte have only two phonemic vowels, while at the other extreme, the Bantu languageBantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
Ngwe
Ngwe language
Ngwe is a Niger–Congo language that is spoken in Cameroon. As of 2001, Ngwe had 73,200 speakers, which was an increase from the numbers of previous censuses. It is part of the Bamileke dialect continuum, and its closest relatives are Yemba and Ngiemboon....
has 14 vowel qualities, 12 of which may occur long or short, making 26 oral vowels, plus 6 nasalized vowels, long and short, making a total of 38 vowels; while !Xóõ
!Xóõ language
Taa, also known as !Xoon or ǃXóõ, is a Khoisan language known for its large number of phonemes. As of 2002, it was spoken by about 4,200 people worldwide. These are mainly in Botswana , but some are in Namibia. The people call themselves ǃXoon or ‘N|ohan Taa, also known as !Xoon or ǃXóõ, is a...
achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation
Phonation
Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, phonation is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the definition used among those who study laryngeal anatomy and physiology...
. Rotokas
Rotokas language
Rotokas is an East Papuan language spoken by some 4000 people in Bougainville, an island to the east of New Guinea, part of Papua New Guinea. There are at least three dialects of the language: Central Rotokas , Aita Rotokas, and Pipipaia...
has only six consonants, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of 77, and Ubyx
Ubykh phonology
Ubykh, a North-West Caucasian language, has the largest consonant inventory of all documented languages that do not use clicks, and also has the most disproportional ratio of phonemic consonants to vowels. It also possesses consonants in at least eight, perhaps nine, basic places of articulation...
81. French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
has no phonemic tone or stress, while several of the Kam–Sui languages
Kam–Sui languages
The Kam–Sui languages are a branch of the Tai–Kadai languages spoken by the Kam–Sui peoples. They are spoken mainly in eastern Guizhou, western Hunan, and northern Guangxi in southern China. Small pockets of Kam–Sui speakers are also found in northern Vietnam and Laos.-Classification:Kam–Sui...
have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages
Kru languages
-References:* Westerman, Diedrich Hermann Languages of West Africa . London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press.-External links:* at Ethnologue*...
, Wobe
Wobé language
Wobé is a Kru language spoken in Ivory Coast. It is one of several languages in a dialect continuum called Wèè .-Tone:Wobé is known for claims that it has the largest number of tones of any language in the world...
, has been claimed to have 14, though this is disputed. The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as eleven in Rotokas
Rotokas
The Rotokas Record was a weapons surrender agreement involving the Bougainville Resistance Force and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the Papua New Guinean government. It was signed on May 3, 2001....
to as many as 112 in !Xóõ (including four tones). The English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowels, including diphthongs, though its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average. (There are 21 consonant and five vowel letters in the English alphabet, but this does not correspond to the number of consonant and vowel sounds.)
The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. The most common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/. Very few languages lack any of these: Arabic lacks /p/, standard Hawaiian
Hawaiian language
The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii...
lacks /t/, Mohawk
Mohawk language
Mohawk is an Iroquoian language spoken by around 2,000 people of the Mohawk nation in the United States and Canada . Mohawk has the largest number of speakers of the Northern Iroquoian languages; today it is the only one with greater than a thousand remaining...
and Tlingit
Tlingit language
The Tlingit language ) is spoken by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada. It is a branch of the Na-Dené language family. Tlingit is very endangered, with fewer than 140 native speakers still living, all of whom are bilingual or near-bilingual in English...
lack /p/ and /m/, Hupa
Hupa language
-External links :* * overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages*...
lacks both /p/ and a simple /k/, colloquial Samoan
Samoan language
Samoan Samoan Samoan (Gagana Sāmoa, is the language of the Samoan Islands, comprising the independent country of Samoa and the United States territory of American Samoa. It is an official language—alongside English—in both jurisdictions. Samoan, a Polynesian language, is the first language for most...
lacks /t/ and /n/, while Rotokas
Rotokas language
Rotokas is an East Papuan language spoken by some 4000 people in Bougainville, an island to the east of New Guinea, part of Papua New Guinea. There are at least three dialects of the language: Central Rotokas , Aita Rotokas, and Pipipaia...
and Quileute
Quileute language
Quileute , also known as Quillayute , is the only surviving Chimakuan language, spoken by a few Quileute and Makah elders on the western coast of the Olympic peninsula south of Cape Flattery at La Push and the lower Hoh River in Washington state, USA...
lack /m/ and /n/.
See also
- Alphabetic principleAlphabetic principleAccording to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words...
- Alternation (linguistics)Alternation (linguistics)In linguistics, an alternation is the phenomenon of a phoneme or morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization. Each of the various realizations is called an alternant...
- Chereme
- Complementary distributionComplementary distributionComplementary distribution in linguistics is the relationship between two different elements, where one element is found in a particular environment and the other element is found in the opposite environment...
- DiphoneDiphoneIn phonetics, a diphone is an adjacent pair of phones. It is usually used to refer to a recording of the transition between two phones.In the following diagram, a stream of phones are represented by P1, P2, etc., and the corresponding diphones are represented by D1-2, D2-3, etc:...
- Diaphoneme
- Emic and eticEmic and eticEmic and etic are terms used by anthropologists and by others in the social and behavioral sciences to refer to two kinds of data concerning human behavior...
- Free variationFree variationFree variation in linguistics is the phenomenon of two sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers...
- Initial-stress-derived nounInitial-stress-derived nounInitial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English, wherein stress is moved to the first syllable of any of several dozen verbs when they become nouns or adjectives. This is called a suprafix in linguistics...
- Minimal pairMinimal pairIn phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
- MorphophonologyMorphophonologyMorphophonology is a branch of linguistics which studies, in general, the interaction between morphological and phonetic processes. When a morpheme is attached to a word, it can alter the phonetic environments of other morphemes in that word. Morphophonemics attempts to describe this process...
- Phone
- Phonemic differentiation
- Phonemic orthographyPhonemic orthographyA phonemic orthography is a writing system where the written graphemes correspond to phonemes, the spoken sounds of the language. In terms of orthographic depth, these are termed shallow orthographies, contrasting with deep orthographies...
- PhonologyPhonologyPhonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
- Sphoṭa
- PhonotacticsPhonotacticsPhonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes...
- TonemeTone (linguistics)Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
- TriphoneTriphoneIn linguistics, a triphone is a sequence of three phonemes. Triphones are useful in models of natural language processing where they are used to establish the various contexts in which a phoneme can occur in a particular natural language....
- VisemeVisemeA viseme is a representational unit used to classify speech sounds in the visual domain. The term viseme was introduced based on the interpretation of the phoneme as a basic unit of speech in the acoustic/auditory domain,...