Phoneme - Assignment of Speech Sounds To Phonemes

Assignment of Speech Sounds To Phonemes

A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, school, skill. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in cat and kit the sound is aspirated, while in school and skill it is unaspirated (listen to U.S. pronunciations of kit and skill). The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed for the aspirated form, for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other sounds would cause a change in meaning if substituted: for example, substitution of the sound would produce the different word still, and that sound must therefore be considered to represent a different phoneme (the phoneme /t/).

The above shows that in English, and are allophones of a single phoneme /k/. In some languages, however, and are perceived by native speakers as different sounds, and substituting one for the other can change the meaning of a word; this means that in those languages, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, in Icelandic, is the first sound of kátur meaning "cheerful", while is the first sound of gátur meaning "riddles". Icelandic therefore has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/.