PHONEMES

A phoneme is a single "unit" of sound that has meaning in any language. There are 44 phonemes in English (in the standard British
model), each one representing a different sound a person can make. Since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, sometimes letter
combinations need to be used to make a phoneme. A letter can also represent different phonemes. Here is a good example:

Chef = /ʃef/
choir = /kwaɪə/
cheese = /tʃi:z/

The "ch" letter combination has three different pronunciations, which are represented by three different phonemes: /ʃ/, /k/ and /tʃ/.
Of course, this is confusing when you need to learn new words, but unfortunately, we are stuck with a strange spelling system in
English. You really just need to learn the pronunciation of every new word, along with its meaning. Unlike other languages, English
spelling is not phonetic.

Sometimes, there is more than one way to pronounce a phoneme. These different pronunciations are called allophones. They are not
phonemes, because they do not change the meaning of the word. Allophones often show up when people have different accents.
One good example is the word "butter". Some native speakers will say [bʌɾə]. Others will say [bʌtə]. You can see here that [t] and
[ɾ] are allophones of the same phoneme. Whatever way you say it, the meaning of the word does not change! It's still the yellow
stuff made from milk that you put on bread.

Because different accents use different allophones, the British and American phonemic charts are a little bit different. Most ESL
students do not need to worry too much about allophones. Use whatever one is in your textbook or dictionary, or ask your teacher
for some advice.

1.-Types of phoneme

The two major phoneme categories are vowels and consonants.

1.1.-Vowels

Basically, a vowel is any "open" sound where there is no obstruction or "blocking" caused by the teeth, tongue, lips, palate or other
articulators. In the English alphabet, there are 5 vowels: A, E, I, O, U. But there are many more vowel sounds in the English
language. For example, the /e/ vowel sound is usually represented by the letter "E". But when you put two "E" letters together, like
in "speed" (/spi:d/), you get a long vowel sound: /i:/.

 Single vowel

A single vowel sound is any vowel that is not a diphthong (see below). A single vowel can be short or long.

 Short vowels

This is the list of the short vowels in standard (RP) English:

/ɪ/ as in ship
/ʊ/ as in book
/e/ as in egg
/æ/ as in cat
/ʌ/ as in cup
/ɒ/ as in hot
 Schwa - /ə/

The schwa is a special type of short vowel. It is a very "weak" sound that is never stressed. This means you often find the schwa in
words with more than one syllable. Here are some examples:

mother: /'mʌðə/
America: /ə'merɪkə/
 Long vowels
In the British English phonemic chart, long vowels are easy to recognise, because they have a colon (":") symbol after them. Some
long vowels are basically longer versions of short vowels (like /ɪ/ and /i:/).

Long vowels in English:

/i:/ as in sheep
/u:/ as in boot
/ɜ:/ as in learn
/ɔ:/ as in door
/ɑ:/ as in car
 Diphthongs

A diphthong is a two vowel sounds, one after the other. There is movement or "glide" between the two parts of the sound. For
example, to say the /eɪ/ dipthong, like in the word "cake" (/keɪk/) first say /e/, then say /ɪ/ without stopping. Your mouth will move
from the /e/ shape to the /ɪ/ shape. This is the "glide".

Diphthongs of English:

/ɪə/ as in beer
/eɪ/ as in same
/ʊə/ as in tour
/ɔɪ/ as in coin
/əʊ/ as in nose
/eə/ as in hair
/aɪ/ as in fly
/aʊ/ as in house
1.2.-Consonants:

Consonants are sounds where there is obstruction or "blocking" of the airflow caused by your lips (/m/), teeth (/θ/), tongue (/l/),
palate (/ŋ/) or even deep down in your larynx (/h/). The two major categories of consonants are voiced and unvoiced consonants.
 Voiced Consonants

Voiced consonants make sound using the vibration of your vocal folds in your larynx - the "voice box". You can tell if a consonant
is voiced in a couple of ways:

1. Put your finger on your throat when you say it. If you feel vibration, it is voiced.

2. Put your fingers in your ears when you say it. If you can still "hear" the consonant through the vibrations in your neck and head,
it is voiced.

Voiced consonants in English:

/b/ as in ball
/d/ as in dog
/ʤ/ as in joke
/g/ as in good
/v/ as in van
/ð/ as in that
/z/ as in zoo
/ʒ/ as in vision
/m/ as in mouth
/n/ as in no
/ŋ/ as in thing
/l/ as in love
/r/ as in right
/w/ as in why
/j/ as in you

 Voiced Consonants
Voiced consonants make sound using the vibration of your vocal folds in your larynx - the "voice box". You can tell if a consonant
is voiced in a couple of ways:

1. Put your finger on your throat when you say it. If you feel vibration, it is voiced.

2. Put your fingers in your ears when you say it. If you can still "hear" the consonant through the vibrations in your neck and head,
it is voiced.

Voiced consonants in English:

/b/ as in ball
/d/ as in dog
/ʤ/ as in joke
/g/ as in good
/v/ as in van
/ð/ as in that
/z/ as in zoo
/ʒ/ as in vision
/m/ as in mouth
/n/ as in no
/ŋ/ as in thing
/l/ as in love
/r/ as in right
/w/ as in why
/j/ as in you
 Unvoiced consonants:

Unvoiced consonants do not use this vibration. Instead they make sound using the movement of air through your teeth, tongue, lips
and other articulators.

Unvoiced consonants in English:

 /p/ as in pea
/t/ as in tea
/ʧ/ as in cheap
/k/ as in coffee
/f/ as in fat
/θ/ as in thin
/s/ as in see
/ʃ/ as in she
/h/ as in he

 Phonemes are the linguistically contrastive or significant sounds (or sets of sounds) of a language. Such a contrast is usually
demonstrated by the existence of minimal pairs or contrast in identical environment (C.I.E.). Minimal pairs are pairs of
words which vary only by the identity of the segment (another word for a single speech sound) at a single location in the
word (eg. [mæt] and [kæt]). If two segments contrast in identical environment then they must belong to different phonemes.
A paradigm of minimal phonological contrasts is a set of words differing only by one speech sound. In most languages it is
rare to find a paradigm that contrasts a complete class of phonemes (eg. All vowels, all consonants, all stops etc.).

Eg. The English stop consonants could be defined by the following set of minimally contrasting words:-

I) /pɪn/ vs /bɪn/ vs /tɪn/ vs /dɪn/ vs /kɪn/

Only /ɡ/ does not occur in this paradigm and at least one minimal pair must be found with each of the other 5 stops to prove
conclusively that it is not a variant form of one of them.

Ii) /ɡɐn/ vs /pɐn/ vs /bɐn/ vs /tɐn/ vs /dɐn/

Again, only five stops belong to this paradigm. A single minimal pair contrasting /ɡ/ and /k/ is required now to fully demonstrate
the set of English stop consonants.

Iii) /ɡæɪn/ vs /kæɪn/

Sometimes it is not possible to find a minimal pair which would support the contrastiveness of two phonemes and it is necessary to
resort to examples of contrast in analogous environment (C.A.E.). C.A.E. is almost a minimal pair, however the pair of words
differs by more than just the pair of sounds in question. Preferably, the other points of variation in the pair of words are as remote as
possible (and certainly never adjacent and preferably not in the same syllable) from the environment of the pairs of sounds being
tested. Eg. /ʃ/ vs /ʒ/ in English are usually supported by examples of pairs such as "pressure" [preʃə] vs "treasure" [treʒə], where
only the initial consonants differ and are sufficiently remote from the opposition being examined to be considered unlikely to have
any conditioning effect on the selection of phones. The only true minimal pairs for these two sounds in English involve at least one
word (often a proper noun) that has been borrowed from another language (eg. "Confucian" [kənfjʉːʃən] vs
"confusion" [kənfjʉːʒən], and "Aleutian" [əlʉːʃən] vs "allusion" [əlʉːʒən]).

A syntagmatic analysis of a speech sound, on the other hand, identifies a unit's identity within a language. In other words, it
indicates all of the locations or contexts within the words of a particular language where the sound can be found.

But would not include the word initial forms of the kind described for [n].

Note that in the above examples, "#" is used to represent a word or syllable boundary, "V" represents any vowel, and "C" represents
another consonant.

ALLOPHONES:
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds, or phones, or signs used to pronounce a
single phoneme in a particular language.[1] For example, [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin, which is less aspirated) are
allophones for the phoneme /p/ in English. The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the
phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation.
Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result
may sound non-native or even unintelligible. Native speakers of a given language perceive one phoneme in the language as
 a single distinctive sound and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations that are used to
pronounce single phonemes.

 Allophones are the linguistically non-significant variants of each phoneme. In other words a phoneme may be realised by
more than one speech sound and the selection of each variant is usually conditioned by the phonetic environment of the
phoneme. Occasionally allophone selection is not conditioned but may vary form person to person and occasion to occasion
(ie. Free variation).

A phoneme is a set of allophones or individual non-contrastive speech segments. Allophones are sounds, whilst a phoneme is a set
of such sounds.

Allophones are usually relatively similar sounds which are in mutually exclusive or complementary distribution (C.D.). The
C.D. of two phones means that the two phones can never be found in the same environment (ie. The same environment in the senses
of position in the word and the identity of adjacent phonemes). If two sounds are phonetically similar and they are in C.D. then they
can be assumed to be allophones of the same phoneme.

Eg. In many languages voiced and voiceless stops with the same place of articulation do not contrast linguistically but are rather
two phonetic realisations of a single phoneme (ie. /p/=[p,b],/t/=[t,d], and /k/=[k,ɡ]). In other words, voicing is not contrastive (at
least for stops) and the selection of the appropriate allophone is in some contexts fully conditioned by phonetic context (eg. Word
medially and depending upon the voicing of adjacent consonants), and is in some contexts either partially conditioned or even
completely unconditioned (eg. Word initially, where in some dialects of a language the voiceless allophone is preferred, in others
the voiced allophone is preferred, and in others the choice of allophone is a matter of individual choice).

There are many allophonic processes in English: lack of plosion, nasal plosion, partial devoicing of sonorants, complete devoicing
of sonorants, partial devoicing of obstruents, lengthening and shortening vowels, and retraction.

 ASPIRATION: In English, a voiceless plosive /p, t, k/ is aspirated (has a string explosion of breath) if it is at the beginning
of the first or a stressed syllable in a word. For example, [pʰ] as in pin and [p] as in spin are allophones for the
phoneme /p/because they cannot distinguish words (in fact, they occur in complementary distribution). English-speakers treat
them as the same sound, but they are different: the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated (plain). Many languages treat
the two phones differently.
 NASAL PLOSION – In English, a plosive (/p, t, k, b, d, ɡ/) has nasal plosion if it is followed by a nasal, whether within a
word or across a word boundary.
 PARTIAL DEVOICING OF SONORANTS: In English, sonorants (/j, w, l, r, m, n, ŋ/) are partially devoiced after a
voiceless sound in the same syllable.
 COMPLETE DEVOICING OF SONORANTS: In English, a sonorant is completely devoiced after an aspirated plosive
(/p, t, k/).
 PARTIAL DEVOICING OF OBSTRUENTS: In English, a voiced obstruent is partially devoiced next to a pause or
next to a voiceless sound withn a word or across a word boundary.
 Retraction: In English, /t, d, n, l/ are retracted before /r/.
Because the choice among allophones is seldom under conscious control, few people realize their existence. English-speakers may
be unaware of the differences among six allophones of the phoneme /t/: unreleased [ t̚] as in cat, aspirated [tʰ]as in top,
glottalized [ʔ] as in button, flapped [ɾ] as in American English water, nasalized flapped as in winter, and none of the above [t] as
in stop. However, they may become aware of the differences if, for example, they contrast the pronunciations of the following
words:

 Night rate: unreleased [ˈnʌɪt̚.ɹʷeɪt̚] (without a word space between . and ɹ)

 Nitrate: aspirated [ˈnaɪ.tʰɹ̥ eɪt̚] or retracted [ˈnaɪ.tʃɹʷeɪt̚]
A flame that is held before the lips while those words are spoken flickers more for the aspirated nitrate than for the
unaspirated night rate. The difference can also be felt by holding the hand in front of the lips. For a Mandarin-speaker, for
whom /t/ and /tʰ/ are separate phonemes, the English distinction is much more obvious than for an English-speaker, who has learned
since childhood to ignore the distinction.
Allophones of English /l/ may be noticed if the 'light' [l] of leaf [ˈliːf] is contrasted with the 'dark' [ɫ] of feel [ˈfiːɫ]. Again, the
difference is much more obvious to a Turkish-speaker, for whom /l/ and /ɫ/ are separate phonemes, than to an English speaker, for
whom they are allophones of a single phonem
one of the phonetically distinct variants of a phoneme.The occurrence of one allophone rather than another is usually determined
by its position in the word (initial, final, medial, etc.) or by its phonetic environment. Speakers of a language often have difficulty in
hearing the phonetic differences between allophones of the same phoneme, because these differences do not serve to distinguish one
word from another. In English the t sounds in the words “hit,” “tip,” and “little” are allophones; phonemically they are considered to
be the same sound although they are different phonetically in terms of aspiration, voicing, and point of articulation. In Japanese and
some dialects of Chinese, the sounds f and h are allophones.