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Phoneme
Each language has a set of sounds and its own phonetic system, as well as several dozens of phonemes (usually between 20 and 40, although certain languages have less phonemes, – up to 15 – while others have much more – up to 70 or more). A phoneme is an abstract unit, composed of a set of sounds. In most cases, the sound and the phoneme are one and the same (the phoneme is always made the same way), but there can be variations (a phoneme can turn into two or several sounds).
For example in English, there’s a difference between a short [i] and a long [i:] to make up different words such as “sick” and “seek”. This difference is sufficient to distinguish two words or morphemes, so we can say that there are two distinct phonemes. Because the length of vowels isn’t very distinctive in French, there won’t be two different words because of the length of a vowel: in the word mine, the length of the vowel [i] has no importance, there will never be two different words. French thus has one phoneme for the sound [i], written /i/.