The phoneme It is the smallest unit of sound in the phonological system of a language.. The phonological system is the inventory that accounts for all the sounds that a language has in its realization in speech.
The word phoneme comes from the Greek φώνημα (phṓnēma), which means ‘sound of voice’.
The phoneme is, therefore, a minimum unit, that is, it cannot be decomposed into smaller units, which is why we say that the phoneme is the minimum articulation of a sound in a language.
Phonemes are divided into two large categories. On the one hand, there are the vowel phonemesreferring to the sounds of the vowels, and, on the other, there are the consonant phonemestypical of consonants.
Vowel phonemes can be classified according to their degree of openness, while consonant phonemes are classified according to their point of articulation in labial, labiodental, coronal, interdental, dental, alveolar, postalveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal and glottal phonemes.
Consonant phonemes are also distinguished according to the mode of articulation: plosives, nasals, simple vibrants, multiple vibrants, fricatives, lateral fricatives, approximants, lateral approximants, ejective stops and implosives.
Furthermore, consonant sounds can be distinguished from each other if they are voiced or deaf. For example, /p/ and /b/ share point and mode of articulation, but they differ in that /p/ is voiceless and /b/ is voiced. So, it will not be the same to say paw what to say coat.
In this sense, Phonemes also have a distinctive function because they allow us to distinguish words that vary by just one sound, completely changing the meaning. Examples of this would be minimum pairs holy and singing, drama and plot, issue and motto.
Generally, each phoneme corresponds to a letter, however, it is worth remembering that the phoneme is the sound representation of the letter, which is the graphic representation or grapheme.
See also Phonology.
Phoneme and grapheme
A phoneme It is the minimum sound unit that has a distinctive value in the phonological system of a language, that is, it is the representation of each of the sounds that a language has. He grapheme, for its part, is the written representation of a sound. Thus, for example, we must differentiate between the phoneme /a/ and, on the other hand, the grapheme towhich is the graphic representation of the sound referred to by the phoneme.