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.

See also

• minimal pair
• phone
• phonology
• emic and etic
• tone (linguistics)
• morphophonology
• list of phonetics topics
• initial-stress-derived noun