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In phonetics (a branch of linguistics), a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words.
In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another. Phones are absolute and are not specific to any language, but phonemes can be discussed only in reference to specific languages.
For example, the English words kid and kit end with two distinct phonemes, /d/ and /t/, and swapping one for the other would change one word into a different word. However, the difference between the /p/ sounds in pun ([pʰ], with aspiration) and spun ([p], without aspiration) never affects the meaning or identity of a word in English. Therefore, [p] cannot be replaced with [pʰ] (or vice versa) and thereby convert one word into another. This causes [pʰ] and [p] to be two distinct phones but not distinct phonemes in English.
In contrast to English, swapping the same two sounds in Hindustani changes one word into another: [pʰal] (फल/پھل) means 'fruit', and [pal] (पल/پل) means 'moment'. [1] The sounds [pʰ] and [p] are thus different phonemes in Hindustani but are not distinct phonemes in English. [2]
As seen in the examples, phonemes, rather than phones, are usually the features of speech that are mapped onto the characters of an orthography.
In the context of spoken languages, a phone is an unanalyzed sound of a language. [3] A phone is a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties and serves as the basic unit of phonetic speech analysis. Phones are generally either vowels or consonants.
A phonetic transcription (based on phones) is enclosed within square brackets ([ ]), rather than the slashes (/ /) of a phonemic transcription, (based on phonemes). Phones (and often also phonemes) are commonly represented by using symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
For example, the English word spin consists of four phones, [s], [p], [ɪ] and [n] and so the word has the phonetic representation [spɪn]. The word pin has three phones. Since its initial sound is aspirated, it can be represented as [pʰ], and the word's phonetic representation would then be [pʰɪn]. (The precise features shown in a phonetic representation depend on whether a narrow or broad transcription is used and which features the writer wishes to draw attention to in a particular context.)
When phones are considered to be realizations of the same phoneme, they are called allophones of that phoneme (more information on the methods of making such assignments can be found under phoneme). In English, for example, [p] and [pʰ] are considered allophones of a single phoneme, which is written /p/. The phonemic transcriptions of those two words is thus /spɪn/ and /pɪn/, and aspiration is then no longer shown since it is not distinctive.
Whether a direct mapping between phonemes and characters is achieved depends on the type of orthography used. Phonological orthographies like the Indonesian orthography tend to have one-to-one mappings of phonemes to characters, whereas alphabetic orthographies like the English orthography tend to try to have direct mappings, but often end up mapping one phoneme to multiple characters.
In the examples above the characters enclosed in square brackets: "pʰ" and "p" are IPA representations of phones. The IPA unlike English and Indonesian is not a practical orthography and is used by linguists to obtain phonetic transcriptions of words in spoken languages and is therefore a strongly phonetically spelled system by design.
In phonology, an allophone is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive and the aspirated form are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, and are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English.
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and [b], pronounced with the lips; and [d], pronounced with the front of the tongue; and [g], pronounced with the back of the tongue;, pronounced throughout the vocal tract;, [v], and, pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and, which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Most consonants are pulmonic, using air pressure from the lungs to generate a sound. Very few natural languages are non-pulmonic, making use of ejectives, implosives, and clicks. Contrasting with consonants are vowels.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
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 represent two separate phonemes in the language.
A phoneme is any set of similar speech sounds that is perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contains phonemes, and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology.
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their Phonemes or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either:
In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth, such as and. In English, labiodentalized /s/, /z/ and /r/ are characteristic of some individuals; these may be written.
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes. Natural 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.
Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA, is a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in ASCII. This way it allows typewriting IPA-symbols by regular keyboard. It was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english. It is named after Evan Kirshenbaum, who led the collaboration that created it. The eSpeak open source software speech synthesizer uses the Kirshenbaum scheme.
Marshallese, also known as Ebon, is a Micronesian language spoken in the Marshall Islands. The language of the Marshallese people, it is spoken by nearly all of the country's population of 59,000, making it the principal language. There are also roughly 27,000 Marshallese citizens residing in the United States, nearly all of whom speak Marshallese, as well as residents in other countries such as Nauru and Kiribati.
In linguistics, complementary distribution 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.
In linguistics, a chroneme is an abstract phonological suprasegmental feature used to signify contrastive differences in the length of speech sounds. Both consonants and vowels can be viewed as displaying this features. The noun chroneme is derived from Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos) 'time', and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous to the -eme in phoneme or morpheme. Two words with different meaning that are spoken exactly the same except for length of one segment are considered a minimal pair. The term was coined by the British phonetician Daniel Jones to avoid using the term phoneme to characterize a feature above the segmental level.
In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers.
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography.
In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have been applied to it. In contrast, a surface representation is the phonetic representation of the word or sound. The concept of an underlying representation is central to generative grammar.
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.
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.
Hindustani is the lingua franca of northern India and Pakistan, and through its two standardized registers, Hindi and Urdu, a co-official language of India and co-official and national language of Pakistan respectively. Phonological differences between the two standards are minimal.
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. Another example 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.