Phoneme

In oral language, a phoneme is the theoretical basic unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes; in sign language, it is a similarly basic unit of hand shape, motion, position, or facial expression. (Formerly termed chereme.) That is, changing a phoneme in a word produces either nonsense, or a different word with a different meaning.

Related Topics:
Language - Morpheme - Sign language - Chereme

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Phonemes are not physical sounds, but mental abstractions of speech sounds. A phoneme is a family of speech sounds (phones) that the speakers of a language think of, and usually hear as, a single sound. A "perfect" alphabet is often considered to be one that has one symbol for each such phoneme.

Related Topics:
Abstraction - Phone

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Phonemics, a branch of phonology, is the study of the system of phonemes of a language.

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