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.

Phonological extremes

Of all the sounds that a human vocal tract can create, 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 some dialects of Abkhaz have only two phonemic vowels, and many Native American languages have three. On other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has fourteen vowel qualities, twelve of which may occur long or short, for twenty-six oral vowels, plus six nasalized vowels, long and short, for thirty-eight vowels; while !Xóõ achieves thirty-one pure vowels—not counting vowel length, which it also has—by varying the phonation. {{susbt:ll|Rotokas}} has only six consonants, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-seven, and Ubyx eighty-one. {{ll|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 fourteen, though this is disputed. The total number of phonemes in languages varies from as few as eleven in Rotokas to as many as 112 in !Xóõ (including four tones). These may range from familiar sounds like {{IPA|}}, {{IPA|}}, or {{IPA|}} to very unusual ones produced in extraordinary ways (see: Click consonant, phonation, airstream mechanism). The English language itself uses a rather large set of thirteen to twenty-two vowels, including diphthongs, though its twenty-two to twenty-six consonants are close to average. (There are twenty-one consonant and five vowel letters in the English alphabet, but this does not correspond to the number of consonant and vowel sounds.)

Related Topics:
Ubyx - Abkhaz - Native American languages - Bantu language - Ngwe - !Xóõ - Kam-Sui languages - Kru languages - Wobe - Click consonant - Phonation - Airstream mechanism - English language

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The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels {{IPA|/i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/}}. The most common consonants are {{IPA|/p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/}}. A very few languages lack one of these: standard Hawai?ian lacks {{IPA|/t/}}, Mohawk lacks {{IPA|/p/}} and {{IPA|/m/}}, Hupa lacks both {{IPA|/p/}} and a simple {{IPA|/k/}}, colloquial Samoan lacks {{IPA|/t/}} and {{IPA|/n/}}, while Rotokas and Quileute lack {{IPA|/m/}} and {{IPA|/n/}}. While most of these languages have very small inventories, Quileute and Hupa have quite complex consonant systems.

Related Topics:
Standard Hawai?ian - Mohawk - Samoan - Quileute

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The ways that sounds are pronounced can vary slightly from language to language even if the same IPA symbol is used. For example, the Finnish word maat ("countries") sounds different from the British English (Received Pronunciation) word mart even though both are transcribed as IPA {{IPA|}}http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/hyfl/projektit/vokaalikartat_eng.html#sweswedish_vowels; the Spanish word sin ("without") has a somewhat different vowel from the American English seen though both are transcribed as {{IPA|}}.

Related Topics:
British English (Received Pronunciation) - Háček - Dvořák - Czech language

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