Language that gives birth directly to another or others, called daughter language(s), such as Latin in relation to French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

Languages spoken by peripheral nations: Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Romanian, Icelandic, etc.

The Romanic and Germanic nations other than the central ones: Iberian and Scandinavian countries, Romania, Iceland, etc.

See Phoneme.

Phonemes are the basic distinctive sounds of a language, of whose combination all the words result. Phonemes are distinctive sounds because the change of one of them for another causes the change of the meaning of the word and, therefore, produces a new word. For example, /f/ and /v/ are two distinct phonemes in English because fast and vast mean different things. But not all the sounds of a language are distinctive, for some of them are equivalent, that is, the change of the one for the other does not modify the meaning of the word: it is only alternative pronunciations (generally, of regional nature) of the same word. For example, the word later may be equally pronounced as [leɪ̯təɹ] or [leɪ̯ɾəɹ] in the American pronunciation. The various sounds representing the same phoneme are called allophones or variants. When a phoneme admits only one pronunciation, we do not say that it has allophones, but only one phone. So allophones are the various phones (i.e. possible pronunciations) of a phoneme. The different allophones of a phoneme can substitute the basic sound without changing the meaning of the word, as, in case, the several pronunciations of r in Brazilian Portuguese. Phonemes are graphically represented between slashes, and their allophones are represented between square brackets. Thus, phoneme /r/ presents in Brazilian Portuguese the allophones [r], [ʁ], [x], [h], etc. Generally, the phonetic symbol chosen to represent a phoneme is that which corresponds to the most common or prestigious pronunciation, called standard pronunciation. But it can also occur that the symbol adopted for the phoneme does not match any of its allophones. This may happen, for example, when we have an affricated phoneme, that is to say, formed by two phonetic sounds, such as /ʧ/, which is pronounced as [tʃ]. The phonemes of a language constitute a relatively small set of units (they seldom surpass 50) which is called phonological system. The European languages have on average between 20 and 40 phonemes; many of them have no allophones, others have two or at most three. Phonemes should not be confused with the letters of the alphabet. Therefore, it is customary to use a specific alphabet, called the International Phonetic Alphabet (see the tab REFERENCE GUIDE), to technically represent phonemes and their allophones). The English alphabet has 26 letters to represent 35 phonemes. Sometimes, the same letter represents more than one phoneme (s can sound as /s/ or /z/), a phoneme may be represented by a digraph (sh sounds /ʃ/), two or more spellings represent the same phoneme (s, ss, c, sc represent all the phoneme /s/), and also a letter may correspond to no phoneme, like French h, which is silent.

See Phonological.

See Phonology.

Belonging to phonetics or the sounds of speech (phones).

Science that studies the sounds of speech, regardless of their phonological value; science that studies phones.

Belonging to phonology or phonemes.

Set of the phonemes of a language and their combination rules.

Science that studies the phonemes of language; science that studies and describes the phonological system of a language.