In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds, or phones, or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English and the aspirated form are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Thai and Hindi. On the other hand, in Spanish and are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English.
Modern Hebrew is phonetically simpler than Biblical Hebrew and has fewer phonemes, but it is phonologically more complex. It has 25 to 27 consonants and 5 to 10 vowels, depending on the speaker and the analysis.
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones are two separate phonemes in the language.
Morphophonology is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes when they combine to form words.
In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words.
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.
In phonetics, palatalization or palatization refers to a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. A consonant pronounced this way is called a palatalized consonant. Palatalized consonants have secondary articulation in the hard palate, or two places of articulation, one of which is palatal. They contrast with palatal consonants, which have palatal primary articulation.
In linguistics, a phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the phonemes of the language. Languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. However, because of their relatively recent modernizations when compared to English, the Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian and Polish orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants. Most dialects of English preserve the consonant and many preserve, while most other Germanic languages have shifted them to and : compare English will and then with German will[vɪl](listen) ('want') and denn[dɛn](listen) ('because').
In linguistics, complementary distribution, as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation, is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other element is found in a non-intersecting (complementary) set of environments.
The phonology of Japanese has about 15 consonant phonemes, the cross-linguistically typical five-vowel system of, and a relatively simple phonotactic distribution of phonemes allowing few consonant clusters. It is traditionally described as having a mora as the unit of timing, with each mora taking up about the same length of time, so that the disyllabic ("Japan") may be analyzed as and dissected into four moras,, ,, and.
Australian English (AuE) 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. As with most dialects of English, it is distinguished primarily by its vowel phonology.
In historical linguistics, phonological change is any sound change that alters the distribution of phonemes in a language. In other words, a language develops a new system of oppositions among its phonemes. Old contrasts may disappear, new ones may emerge, or they may simply be rearranged. Sound change may be an impetus for changes in the phonological structures of a language. One process of phonological change is rephonemicization, in which the distribution of phonemes changes by either addition of new phonemes or a reorganization of existing phonemes. Mergers and splits are types of rephonemicization and are discussed further below.
The phonological system of the modern Belarusian language consists of at least 44 phonemes: 5 vowels and 39 consonants. Consonants may also be geminated. There is not absolute agreement on the number of phonemes, so that rarer or contextually variant sounds are included by some scholars.
Unlike many languages, Icelandic has only very minor dialectal differences in sounds. The language has both monophthongs and diphthongs, and many consonants can be voiced or unvoiced.
This article explains the phonology of the Malay language based on the pronunciation of Standard Malay, which is the official language of Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesian.
Phonemic contrast refers to a minimal phonetic difference, that is, small differences in speech sounds, that makes a difference in how the sound is perceived by listeners, and can therefore lead to different mental lexical entries for words. For example, whether a sound is voiced or unvoiced matters for how a sound is perceived in many languages, such that changing this phonetic feature can yield a different word ; see Phoneme. Other examples in English of a phonemic contrast would be the difference between leak and league; the minimal difference of voicing between [k] and [g] does lead to the two utterances being perceived as different words. On the other hand, an example that is not a phonemic contrast in English is the difference between and. In this case the minimal difference of vowel length is not a contrast in English and so those two forms would be perceived as different pronunciations of the same word seat.
In phonetics and linguistics the phonetic environment refers to the surrounding sounds of a target speech sound, or target phone, in a word. The phonetic environment of a phone can sometimes determine the allophonic or phonemic qualities of a sound in a given language.
In the sociolinguistics of the English language, raising or short-a raising is a phenomenon in most American and many Canadian English accents, by which the "short a" vowel, the North American TRAP/BATH vowel, is pronounced with a raising of the tongue. Many forms of raising are specifically tensing: occurring only in certain words or environments, with a combination of greater raising, lengthening, and gliding than in other environments. The realization of this "tense" varies from to to to, and is greatly dependent on the speaker's particular dialect. A common realization is [eə](listen), a transcription that will be used throughout this article to represent the tensed vowel. The most common context for tensing throughout North American English, regardless of dialect, is when this vowel appears before a nasal consonant.
