Phoneme (definition)

Phonemes are sounds that make a contrast in meaning. For example, in English /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes, because they distinguish the words pat and bat. Variant pronunciations of a sound are called allophones. At the ends of words in English, aspirated stops such as such as [pʰ] and unaspirated stops such as [p] are allophones of the same phoneme /p/, because words like top can be pronounced as either [tʰɑpʰ] or [tʰɑp]. Traditionally phonemes are written between slashes (/ /) and allophones are transcribed in square brackets [ ] .

See Also

• Allophone (definition)

External Links

• http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm

The link below takes you away from the Gaelic Wiki to Wikipedia. Since wikipedia pages can be edited by anyone, they often contain inaccurate information. So be careful!

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

References

• Crystal, David (1997). Dictionary of linguistics and Phonetics. Malden: Blackwell