phoneme
nounUK /ˈfəʊ.niːm/ · US /ˈfoʊ.nim/
Etymology From Ancient Greek φώνημα (phṓnēma, “sound”), from φωνέω (phōnéō, “to sound”), from φωνή (phōnḗ, “sound”). By surface analysis, phone (“speech sound”) + -eme (“unit”).
1
Human sciences, Linguistics, Phonology, Sciences An indivisible unit of sound in a given language. A phoneme is an abstraction of the physical speech sounds (phones) and may encompass several different phones.
- It is crucial for the phoneme structure of Finnish — traditionally /d/ has not been included in the Finnish phonotax, but it fulfils the criteria of a phoneme (Karlsson, 1983: 66-7).1990, Jarmo Lainio, “Sweden Finnish — development or deterioration?”, in Durk Gorter, editor, Fourth International Conference on Minority Languages: Western and Eastern European papers, Multilingual Matters, →ISBN, page 31:
- Derived terms
- archiphoneme, diaphoneme, grapheme-phoneme correspondence, metaphoneme, morphophoneme, phonemal, phonematic, phonemehood, phonemic, phonemical, phonemically, phonemicist, phonemicity, phonemics, subphoneme
- Related terms
41 terms
allophone, allophonic, allophonical, allophonically, allophonics, diaphone, diaphonic, diaphonical, diaphonically, diaphonics, diaphonologic, diaphonological, diaphonologically, diaphonology, grapheme-to-phoneme, -phone, phone, phonetic, phonetical, phonetically, phonetics, phonic, phonical, phonically, phonics, phono-, phonologic, phonological, phonologically, phonologist, phonology, chereme, chroneme, grammeme, grapheme, lemma, lexeme, listeme, morpheme, sememe, toneme