Phonemes

In describing a sound in English, phonemes are used. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that, if changed, will change the meaning of a word. For example, the word cat changes to bat if you change the / k / sound to / b /. In British English, there are 44 phonemes. Different varieties of English have slightly different numbers of phonemes. For example, American English has the same number of consonants, but fewer vowel sounds than in British English. Although phonemes are units of sound, there is also a written way of representing them. This is called the phonemic alphabet. It is derived from the more detailed International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).