Sounds of the English Language

an introduction to phonemes

A phoneme is the smallest unit of a spoken language that conveys meaning. The English word bad has three phonemes (b, a, and d). If any one of these phonemes is substituted by another, the meaning changes. For example, when e is substituted for a in the word bad, a new word with a different meaning is formed. Read the rest of this post free on Substack.