Lesson 1: Phonemes

Phonemes

Linguists use the word phoneme to describe a language’s fundamental units of sound. For example, the words /sɪt/ (sit) and /bɪt/ (bit) each have three phonemes, but only two in common: /ɪ/ and /t/. They are distinguished strictly by their first phoneme. Other examples of English phonemes are /k/, /g/, /θ/, /ə/, /ɑː/, and /iː/. The symbols used to represent these phonemes are part of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).