Phone (phonetics)


In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words.
In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another. Phones are absolute and are not specific to any language, but phonemes can be discussed only in reference to specific languages.
For example, the English words kid and kit end with two distinct phonemes, /d/ and /t/, and swapping one for the other would change one word into a different word. However, the difference between the /p/ sounds in pun and spun never affects the meaning or identity of a word in English; it's not possible to replace with and thereby convert one word to another. Thus, and are two distinct phones but not distinct phonemes in English.
By contrast, swapping the same two sounds in Hindustani can change one word into another: means 'fruit', and means 'moment'. The sounds are then different phonemes.
As can be seen in those examples, phonemes, rather than phones, are the features of speech that are typically reflected in a writing system.

Overview

In the context of spoken languages, a phone is an unanalyzed sound of a language. A phone is a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties and serves as the basic unit of phonetic speech analysis. Phones are generally either vowels or consonants.
A phonetic transcription is enclosed within square brackets rather than the slashes of a phonemic transcription. Phones are commonly represented by using symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
For example, the English word spin consists of four phones, , , and , and the word thus has the phonetic representation . The word pin has three phones; in that word, the initial sound is aspirated and so can be represented as ; the word's phonetic representation would then be .
When phones are considered to be realizations of the same phoneme, they are called allophones of that phoneme. In English, for example, and are considered allophones of a single phoneme, which is written /p/. The phonemic transcriptions of those two words is thus /spɪn/ and /pɪn/, and aspiration no longer being shown since it is not distinctive.