What are phonemes and whys it so hard to lose a foreign accent?
[Previous] [Next] [Index] [–markrose] The sounds (phones) humans can make are infinite; there’s (almost always) a continuum of phones between any two phones. In any one language, however, phones are grouped into 20 to 60 or so discrete groups of sounds called phonemes. The range of variation for each phoneme is discounted by speakers and hearers of the language, who perceive the entire range as “the same sound.” The diversity of phones, and their grouping into phonemes, can be clearly seen on this chart from William Labov’s Principles of Linguistic Change (1994). The chart is a graph of formant frequencies F1 against F2 for the main vowels of fifty words as spoken by a single person– in effect, a plot of fifty actual phones. (The words on the chart– beat, bait, etc.– are not the words being spoken, but just examples of words with those vowel sounds.) (Most of the sounds plotted are diphthongs, which are glides between two sounds; this accounts for some of the overlaps on the diagra
