Phonemes for English consonants

Welcome to my new post!

Today we're going to learn about phonemes in English. 

A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. When sounds appear in the same enviroment (in the same place of the word and between the same sounds) and they make a difference in meaning they are different phonemes. Phonemes are a mental representation of sounds. They are very much like a concept or idea, not the actual pronunciation of a sound. 

An example could be the final sounds in words like bath and bat. The transcription of the word "bath" is /bæθ/ and the trascription of the word "bat" is /bæt/. If we change the /θ/ sound in the word "bath" for a /t/ sound the meaning change to "bat". This means that they are different phonemes.    

In English there are 24 phonemes for consonants and 12 for pure vowels. Today we are going to see the phonemes for consonants. 

1. /p/ (pain, pill, put, top, hip)
2. /t/ (tea, take, tone, late, sent)
3. /k/ (come, king, cut, look, duck)
4. /b/ (big, bee, banana, bat, be)
5. /d/ (do, dog, date, dear, road)
6. /g/ (gap, girl, goat, bag, league)
7. /m/ (make, smoke, climb, name, move)
8. /n/ (nose, none, nurse, name, soon)
9. /ŋ/ (wrong, think, finger, sing, rang)
10. /f/ (feet, father, photo, off, rough)
11. /v/ (vain, voice, vine, give, of)
12. /θ/ (thief, thick, thought, bath, beath)
13. /ð/ (this, they, there, bathe, breathe)
14. /s/ (son, sit, soap, ice, cinema)
15. /z/ (zoo, zero, easy, busy, gaze)
16. /ʃ/ (she, shoes, sugar, finish, rush)
17. /ʒ/ (beige, pleasure, casual, confusion, vision)
18. /l/ (late, let, loud, bell, belt)
19. /w/ (wet, wine, what, wave, we)
20. /j/ (you, yes, yellow, young, year)
21. /r/ (rest, read, red, try, arrive)
22. /h/ (he, hate, here, ahead, ham)
23. /tʃ/ (chair, church, choke, watch, cheap)
24. /dʒ/ (joy, June, change, Jane, jeep)

In the next post we are going to see the phonemes for the vowels. I hope you find this useful. J