page_title: Phoneme
section_title: Assignment of speech sounds to phonemes
hierarchical_section_title: Phoneme / Assignment of speech sounds to phonemes
context_page_description: In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a particular language.
  For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the west midlands and the north-west of England, the sound patterns and are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, for another phoneme. Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair. If, in another language, any two sequences differing only by pronunciation of the final sounds [n] or [ŋ] are perceived as being the same in meaning, then these two sounds are interpreted as variants of a single phoneme in that language.
  Phonemes that are established by the use of minimal pairs, such as tap vs tab or pat vs bat, are written between slashes. To show pronunciation, linguists use square brackets.
  Within linguistics, there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. However, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set of speech sounds that are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language.
context_section_description: 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 is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, scat, skit. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects, the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in kit  [kʰɪt], the sound is aspirated, but in skill  [skɪl], it is unaspirated. The words, therefore, contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed [kʰ] for the aspirated form and [k] for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other sounds would cause a change in meaning if substituted: for example, substitution of the sound [t] would produce the different word still, and that sound must therefore be considered to represent a different phoneme (the phoneme /t/).
  The above shows that in English, [k] and [kʰ] are allophones of a single phoneme /k/. In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are perceived by native speakers as different sounds, and substituting one for the other can change the meaning of a word. In those languages, therefore, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, in Icelandic, [kʰ] is the first sound of kátur, meaning "cheerful", but [k] is the first sound of gátur, meaning "riddles". Icelandic, therefore, has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/.
caption: A simplified procedure for determining whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes