phoneme UK /ˈfəʊ.niːm/US /ˈfoʊ.nim/ noun1 •An indivisible unit of sound in a given language. A phoneme is an abstraction of the physical speech sounds (phones) and may encompass several different phones.It is crucial for the phoneme structure of Finnish — traditionally /d/ has not been included in the Finnish phonotax, but it fulfils the criteria of a phoneme (Karlsson, 1983: 66-7). — 1990 formsphonemes
