Phoneme is the smallest sound unit of the phonological system of a language. Phonology it is the discipline that studies each of the sounds of the voice.
Each phoneme has the function of establishing a difference in meaning between one word and another. For example, in oral language the words "manto” and “çanto” are distinguished only by the phonemes “m” and “c”.
In Portuguese, for example, the sounds "p" and "b" in "pala" and "bala" are two different phonemes, while in the word "dedo" the sounds of the first and second "d" are allophones. The phone is the realization of the phoneme while allophones consist of phonic variations.
In many words, the phoneme corresponds to a letter. However, it is important to remember that the phoneme is the sound representation, while the letter is the graphic representation.
In the words of the first example, manto (m-ã-t-o) and canto (c-ã-t-o), due to the nasalization of the vowels, each word has 5 letters and only 4 phonemes.
The same phoneme can also be represented by different letters of the alphabet. This is the case of the phoneme "z" (sound of z) in the words: a
zedo, thesilo, andxigent.On the other hand, the same letter can represent one or more phonemes. One such case is the letter "x" which is pronounced as:
z (andxlove)
s(youxto)
ok (toxina)
tea(inxlove)
A more in-depth study of phonemes allows them to be classified into: vowels (the phoneme is produced without any obstacle to its passage), semivowels (diphthongs i and u) and consonants (the phoneme is produced after passing obstacles such as lips, tongue, teeth, palate, soft palate and uvula).
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Phonemes and Graphemes
A phoneme is the minimum phonic unit provided with a distinct value. The number and types of phonemes vary across languages, but their number is limited as opposed to inter-individual variants (allophones) and above all to individual variants in concrete phonic realization (phones).
A grapheme is a concept related to linguistics and represents the unit of a writing system, and may be synonymous with a letter, despite having some subtle differences.
In some cases, the same letter can mean more than one phoneme, which implies that the number of letters is not always equal to the number of phonemes.