Phonetics, in linguistics, is the study of speech sounds. It deals with their articulation (articulatory phonetics), their acoustic properties (acoustic phonetics), and how they combine to make syllables, words, and sentences (linguistic phonetics).
In phonetics, a "phone" is a unit of speech sound. The word "phone" may refer to any speech sound or gesture considered a physical event without regard to its place in the phonology of a language. it's the same to say that A "phone" is a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties, and serves as the basic unit of phonetic speech analysis.
In contrast, a "phoneme" is a set of phones or a set of sound features that are thought of as the same element within the phonology of a particular language; it's the same to say that "phoneme" is the smallest unit of speech that can be used to make one word different from another word. The sounds represented by “c” and “b” are different phonemes, as in the words “cat” and “bat.”
A phonetic transcription (phone) is enclosed within square brackets ([ ]), rather than the slashes (/ /) of a phonemic transcription (phoneme).
Comparison
Here is a chart that compares phones and phonemes:
| A phone is … | A phoneme is … |
|---|---|
| One of many possible sounds in the languages of the world. | A contrastive unit in the sound system of a particular language. |
| The smallest identifiable unit found in a stream of speech. | A minimal unit that serves to distinguish between meanings of words. |
| Pronounced in a defined way. | Pronounced in one or more ways, depending on the number of allophones. |
| Represented between brackets by convention. Example: [b], [j], [o] |
Represented between slashes by convention. Example: /b/, /j/, /o/ |
An example of a phoneme is the /t/ sound in the words tip, stand, water, and cat. (In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes, as here.) These instances of /t/ are considered to fall under the same sound category despite the fact that in each word they are pronounced somewhat differently. The difference may not even be audible to native speakers, or the audible differences not perceived. That is, a phoneme may encompass several recognizably different speech sounds, called phones. In our example, the /t/ in tip is aspirated, [tʰ], while the /t/ in stand is not, [t]. (In transcription, speech sounds that are not phonemes are placed in brackets, as here.) In many languages, such as Korean and Spanish, these phones are different phonemes: For example, in Spanish, there is no aspirated [tʰ], but the phone in American English writer is similar to the Spanish "r" /ɾ/ and contrasts with Spanish /t/.
Phones that belong to the same phoneme, such as [t] and [tʰ] for English /t/, are called allophones. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding minimal pairs: words that differ by only the phones in question. For example, the words tip and dip illustrate that [t] and [d] are separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/, in English.
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