phoneme ˈfəʊniːm This is the fundamental unit of phonology, which has been defined and used in manydifferent ways. Virtually all theories of phonology hold that spoken language can be broken down into a string of sound units (phonemes), and that each language has a small, relatively fixed set of these phonemes. Most phonemes can be put into groups; for example, in English we can identify a group of plosive phonemes p, t, k, b, d, ɡ, a group of voiceless fricatives f, θ, s, ʃ, h, and so on. An important question in phoneme theory is how the analyst can establish what the phonemes of a language are. The most widely accepted view is that phonemes are contrastive and one must find cases where the difference between two words is dependent on the difference between two phonemes: for example,we can prove that the difference between ‘pin’ and ‘pan’ depends on the vowel, and that ɪ and æ are different phonemes. Pairs of words that differ in just one phoneme are known as minimal pairs. We can establish the same fact about p and b by citing ‘pin’ and ‘bin’. Of course, you can only start doing commutation tests like this when you have aprovisional list of possible phonemes to test, so some basic phonetic analysis must precede this stage. Other fundamental concepts used in phonemic analysis of this sort are complementary distribution, free variation, distinctive feature and allophone. | 