/ˈfoʊniːm/
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(a ‘phoneme’ is a ‘unit’ of ‘sound’ that distinguishes 1 ‘word’ from another in a particular ‘language’)
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For example, in most dialects of English, the sound patterns /sɪn/ (sin) and /sɪŋ/ (sing) are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, /n/, for another phoneme, /ŋ/.
(Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair.)
In many other languages, they would be interpreted as exactly the same set of phonemes, and so /n/ and /ŋ/ would be considered to be the same.
In linguistics, phonemes that are usually established by the use of minimal pairs, such as kill vs kiss or pat vs bat, are written between slashes: /p/.
To show pronunciation more precisely, linguists use square brackets: [pʰ] (indicating an aspirated p).
Within linguistics, there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic (or phonematic) terms.
However, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (phones) that are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language.
For example, the English k sounds in the words kill and skill are not identical (as described below), but they are distributional variants of a single phoneme /k/.
Different speech sounds that are realizations of the same phoneme are known as allophones.
(‘allophonic’ variation may be conditioned, in which case a certain phoneme is realized as a certain allophone in particular phonological environments, or it may otherwise be free, and may then vary randomly)
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(therefore, ‘phonemes’ are often considered to constitute an ‘abstract underlying representation’ for ‘segments’ of ‘words’, while ‘speech sounds’ make up the corresponding ‘phonetic realization’, or the ‘surface form’)
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