Linguistics

[Sarah Anne]

Hi,

I need help in explaining what the difference between phonemic and phonetic vowels are. Can anyone help?

Thanks,
Sarah

[Soup]

Start here: Nabble - (teach) phonetic vs phonemic

[Raymott]

Hi,

I need help in explaining what the difference between phonemic and phonetic vowels are. Can anyone help?

Thanks,
Sarah

In the word “bed”, three different speakers might pronounce this as [bed], [bɛd], be:d]. The vowels involved are three phonetic variants (allophones) of one phoneme /e/. These three phonetic transcriptions would all be transcribed phonemically as /bed/. By contrast [æ] is not an allophone of /e/, because /bæd/ “bad” is a different word from “bed”.