Phoneme

Phonemes are the units of sound (speech) that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. Most varieties (accents and dialects) of spoken English have about 23 consonant phonemes and 21 vowel phonemes (altogether 44 phonemes) but only 26 letters in writing. To see all the phonemes in English, the International Phonetic Alphabet has a unique letter for every phoneme, unlike the English alphabet.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in spoken language that can change the meaning of a word. If you swap one sound for another, the entire meaning of the word changes.

The word "cat" has three phonemes (sounds) as part of its word: /k/, /æ/, and /t/.

A good way to learn phonemes in a language is to learn minimal pairs. A minimal pair is a pair of different words that are different by only one sound.

An example of a minimal pair is "bit" and "bat". Even though only the vowel in each word is different, each word has a completely different meaning. Like "bit" and "bat", with the words "rip" and "zip", we have two different meanings even though only the first consonant in each word is different. That different sound (in this case a one-letter sound) is a phoneme.

The /f/ sound in the word phoneme is itself a phoneme. If the "ph" sound was instead a "p" sound followed by an "h" sound, the letters "ph" would consist of two phonemes not one.

In short, letters are not phonemes. In the word "phone", "ph" is a phoneme sounding like "f". If we removed the letter "p" from phone, we would have the word "hone"; if we removed the phoneme "ph" from phone, we would have the word "one". The phoneme "ph" in the word phone is pretty much the same as the phoneme "f" in the word "funny". Phonemes do not need to appear similar to sound similar.

Some other examples of minimal pairs are "bug" and "bag", "dog" and "dig", "hog" and "hug", "cut" and cub", "wag" and "tag", "mop" and "cop", "shop" and "sop", "this" and "thus", "chug" and "pug", and "quick" and "quack". Just changing a single sound in each of these words made a word meaning something totally different.