Phonemes are units of sound in speech that combine to form words. There are 44 phonemes in English, consisting of 24 consonants and 20 vowels. Phonemes help distinguish one word from another. For example, the words "cat" and "phone" contain different phonemes that change the meaning. Allophones are variations in how a phoneme can be pronounced that do not change a word's meaning, like the "p" sound in "pin" and "spin". Minimal pairs are words that differ by only one phoneme, such as "tight" and "fight".

1. The Phonemes
Presented By: Rai Sarfraz

2. The Phoneme
 A phoneme is a unit of sound in speech. A phoneme doesn't
have any inherent meaning by itself, but when you
put phonemes together, they can make words.
 There are 44 phonemes in English language
 24 phonemes are consonants and 20 phonemes are vowel
 These phonemes help distinguish one word or meaning from
another

3.  Examples:
 The word cat is made up of 3 phonemes - /k/ /æ/ /t/ -
whereas a word such as phone is made up three
phonemes /f/ /əʊ/ /n/.
 And for something a little more difficult, the word “school”
has four Phonemes: the “s” sound, a “k” sound, a long “uu”
sound, and an “l” sound.

4. Allophones:
 In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds,
or phones, or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular
language.
 Allophones cannot distinguish between words
 A difference between the two is that changing the phoneme changes the
meaning of the word, whereas changing the allophone changes the sound of
word but does not change the meaning of the word.
 For example, [pʰ] as in pin and [p] as in spin are allophones for the phoneme
/p/ because they cannot distinguish words (in fact, they occur in
complementary distribution).

5. Minimal Pairs:
 A minimal pair is a pair of words with ONE phonemic
difference only.
 They have same number of sounds.
 A sound that is different have same position.
 Example: Tight-Fight
Cat-Mat
Fat-Bat