*-* The Phoneme *-*

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes meaning. Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but abstractions of them. An example of a phoneme would be the /t/ found in words like tip, stand, writer, and cat
In sign languages, the basic movements were formerly called cheremes (or cheiremes), but usage changed to phoneme
Some linguists (e.g. Roman Jakobson) consider phonemes to be further decomposable into features, such features being the true minimal constituents of language. Features as opposed to phonemes however overlap each other in time. A phoneme could be seen as a contemporaneous bundle of features
A phoneme can include slightly different sounds or phones. For instance, the p sound in the English words pin and spin is pronounced differently. In some languages, such as Korean, these phones would be considered different phonemes. But English does not distinguish them, so in English both are considered to be a single /p/ phoneme. Two phones that belong to the same phoneme are called allophones. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phones relies on finding so-called minimal pairs: words that differ only by the phones in question
Examples of phonemes in the English language would include sounds from the set of English consonants, like /p/ and /b/. These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. However, phonemes might not be so apparent in written English, such as when they are typically represented with combined letters, called digraphs, like <sh> (pronounced /ʃ/) or <ch> (pronounced /tʃ/)
Two sounds that may be allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, /p/ has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones:aspirated as in /pɪn/, and non-aspirated as in /spɪn/. However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated /pʰ/ is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated /p/. As another example, there is no distinction between [r] and [l] in Japanese, there is only one /r/ phoneme in Japanese, although the Japanese /r/ has allophones that make it sound more like an /l/, /d/ (specifically the flapped form [ɾ]), or /r/ to English speakers. The sounds /z/ and /s/ are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish. /n/ (as in run) and /ŋ/ (as in rung) are phonemes in English, but allophones in Italian and Spanish
An important phoneme is the chroneme, a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish or Japanese allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Italian or Australian English use it after only one (in the case of Italian, consonants; in the case of Australian, vowels