What is a phoneme?

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The sounds of English: phonemes, allophones and minimal pairs

In what follows, you will see that certain letters appear between two diagonal lines, like this: /b/. The diagonal lines are the conventional way to show that we are talking about the sound, not the letter itself.
For example, the first letters of cinema and cave are the same, a 'c', but the sound they represent is different. In cinema, it is an /s/ and in cave it is a /k/ sound.

A phoneme is, essentially, a sound but the critical point is that it is a sound which carries meaning.

The first thing to be aware of is that we are talking about English sounds. The study of language sounds (phonemic analysis) is language specific.

Phonemes:: In English, we make a difference between the words pat and bat simply by changing the 'p' to a 'b' sound. This is because the sounds /p/ and /b/ in English are phonemes. Selecting one sound or another will make a difference to the meaning of the noise you make when you say a word.
If you change a single sound in a word and make a new word, the sound you have changed is a phoneme in that language.
In other languages, most varieties of Arabic, for example, these two sounds are not phonemes and changing one to the other will not change the meaning of a word (but it might sound odd).
Allophones:: Allophones are slightly different pronunciations of certain phonemes which do not affect the meaning of what is said (although it may sound odd). We saw above that /p/ and /b/ are allophones in most varieties of Arabic as are, incidentally, /f/ and /v/ in some varieties.
All languages have a number of allophones. For example, in English the sound /t/ can be pronounced with and without a following /h/ sound. Compare the sounds in track and tack.
If you hold a thin piece of paper in front of your mouth and say tack loudly, the paper will move.
If you do the same with the word track, the paper won't (or shouldn't) move (unless you shout).
In English, these two ways to say the letter 't' are not phonemes because you can change from one to the other without changing the meaning of the word.
In some languages, Mandarin, for example, the two ways to say 't' are separate phonemes and swapping them around will change the meaning of what you say.
Minimal pairs:: Pairs of words which are distinguished only by a change in one phoneme are called minimal pairs. For example, hit-hat, kick-sick, fit-bit, sheep-ship, jerk-dirk, hot-cot, love-live etc. are all distinguished in meaning by a single change to one sound. That's in English, of course. It bears repeating that what is an allophone in English may be a phoneme in other languages and vice versa.
There is a list on this site of commonly used minimal pairs for classroom practice. Click here to get it.

British English phonemes

We are talking about one standard variety of English only here. Other standards, US, Caribbean, Australian etc., will have slightly different sets of phonemes. That is how accents are often recognised.

There are two fundamental sorts of phonemes in any language.

Consonants
are made by blocking or partially blocking the air flow.

Vowels
are made by expelling air through you mouth with the tongue in various positions.

voiced sounds which sound stronger because you also vibrate the cords in your throat when you make them.
They are the sounds at the beginnings of these words:
    butter, book, bill
    dim, dunce, dance
    give, gap, go
    judge, jump, John
    vale, van, victory
    that, though, thus
    zoom, zombie, zillion
    gendarme, genre, j'accuse
unvoiced sounds which sound weaker and do not involve the addition of vibration of the vocal cords. They are the sounds at the beginning of these words:
    push, pill, pent
    tip, tap, top
    kit, cake, cut
    chart, chop, chip
    find, funny, farce
    theory, thigh, thump
    sassy, save, sort
    shop, ship, sheep
other consonant sounds which do not form part of the pairs of voiced and unvoiced sounds and occur at the beginning of these words:
    hat, hopper, hoop
    my, money, monster
    knee, know, nice
    love, legal, lorry
    roll, roof, Roger
    yell, yard, yonder
    wish, was, why
and one other consonant sound which in English only occurs at the end of words as in:
    ring, thing, sling

pure vowels which consist of only one sound. They occur in these words:
    eat, eek, easy
    into, is, if
    look, took, shook
    choose, views, news
    bed, said, shed
    ago, the, a
    terse, verse, hearse
    bought, sought, law
    mat, cat, hat
    pub, cub, shove
    heart, chart, laugh
    notch, knot, what
and at the end of:
    savvy, shabby, tacky
diphthong which are combinations of two vowels and occur in these words:
    cheer, near, queer
    euro, curate, pure (this sound is variably pronounced by British English speakers)
    toy, hoy, cloy
    chair, lair, mayor
    face, pace, chase
    lice, wine, fine
    note, vote, soak
    rout, snout, bout

If you read the lists above out loud, you have pronounced all the phonemes in English at least three times each.

Purely for your reference, here is a list of the representation of all the phonemes in English with a few notes. Sooner or later, you will have to learn to use the symbols.
phonemese
If you want this chart as a PDF document, click here.

The next section of the course is about consonants and after that we'll consider vowels.

Learn more about:

Pronunciation
How to transcribe the sounds of English

Take a test

To make sure you have understood so far, try a very short test of your knowledge of phonemes.
Use the 'Back' button to return when you have done that.

If you got that all right, it is safe to move on.

The next area to learn about is Consonants. Click here to go to that section.