Phonemes are the units of sound (speech) which distinguish oneword from another in a particular language.[1] In mostvarieties (accents anddialects) of spoken English there are about 23consonantal phonemes and 21vowel phonemes (altogether 44 phonemes), but only 26letters in writing. To see all the phonemes in English, theIPA, has a unique letter for every phoneme, unlike theEnglish alphabet.
A good way to learn phonemes in a language is to learnminimal pairs. A minimal pair is a pair of different words that are different by only one sound. An example of this is "bit" and "bat". Even though only the vowel in each word is different, each word has a completely different meaning. Another example is "dip" and "tip", where both words have different meanings even though only the first consonant in each word is different.
- ↑Concise Oxford English dictionary, p1027.
