In human language, a phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes meaning. Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but abstractions of them. An example of a phoneme would be the found in words like tip, stand, writer, and cat.
Tone (linguistics) Prague Linguistic Circle Rotokas language Chroneme Nikolai Trubetzkoy Minimal pair Pāṇini Phone Allophone Morpheme Abstraction Phonology Spanish language Triphone Viseme Mikołaj Kruszewski Chereme Stokoe notation Underspecification Quileute (tribe) Shiva Sutra Hupa language Underlying representation Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay Initial-stress-derived noun Segment (linguistics) Distinctive feature Italian language Japanese language Tolkāppiyam Arabic language Free variation Emic and etic Morphophonology Alternation (linguistics) Complementary distribution Morris Halle Canadian raising Phonemic orthography Leonard Bloomfield
