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212 PILLAR 2 Development and LearningBuilding Blocks of Language 13-1 What are the building blocks of language? To build a house, you need materials and knowledge of the rules required to assemble the materials properly. A particular house might require concrete, wood, drywall, plumbing fixtures, and so forth. If you try to assemble these parts without following construction and engineering principles, the house probably won%u2019t survive the first windstorm. Language is similar%u2014we build our language from basic elements and follow rules to determine how we can combine the pieces. The most basic building block is the phoneme, the smallest distinctive unit of sound in a language. Make the sound represented by the letter d %u2014that%u2019s a phoneme. So is the sound represented by the letter b , and the sound from the combination th . In English, each vowel has several phonemes (the sound of the a in shapeis different from the sound of the a in hat). Hundreds of phonemes, including clicking sounds and tones, have been identified. Phonemes can be combined to make other sounds, and when placed in the correct order those sounds form words. How many phonemes are in the word dog? Three: d , o , and g . How about ship ? Also three: sh , i , and p . The English language has about 40 phonemes; the number of phonemes in other languages ranges from 20 to more than 80. Linguists (scientists who study language) who examined nearly 500 languages identified 869 different phonemes in human speech. But they found that no language uses all of them. 1 , 2 Those 800-plus sounds %u201ccan form all the words in every language of the world.%u201d 3 It%u2019s important to note that phonemes represent spoken sounds, not written symbols. (We will have more to say about written symbols later.) As a young baby, you could produce all the phonemes of every spoken language%u2014but only for a short time. The basic rule of phonemes is %u201cUse %u2019em or lose %u2019em.%u201d By the time you reached your first birthday, you lost your remarkable ability to babble in multiple languages and instead settled into using the phonemes that your family members and caregivers spoke around you. Over time, we become specialists in the language that we hear. We practice the phonemes that make up this language and then begin focusing on developing a vocabulary to represent the people and objects that we encounter. If your first language is Japanese, you may find distinguishing the English r and l sounds challenging because these sounds are not part of the Japanese language that you heard as a baby. If English is your first language, then you may have trouble pronouncing German%u2019s breathy ch sound (found in Ich , the German word for %u201cI%u201d). But if German was your first language, you may struggle with the English th and may pronounce this as dis . Sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) use building blocks that are similar phonemes, but in this case the phonemes are hand shapes and movements rather than sounds. There are more than 200 different sign languages, and as with spoken languages, they are easier to learn the younger you are. It may be difficult to learn signs if you haven%u2019t used them in childhood. People who learn one sign language and later learn a second sign language usually have an accent in the new language. 4 Remember, phonemes don%u2019t have meaning in and of themselves%u2014the p sound doesn%u2019t mean anything, nor does the f sound. But we can combine phonemes to form a morpheme %u2014the smallest unit that carries meaning in a language. Sometimes a single phoneme can also be a morpheme, as in I . More often, several phonemes combine to form a morpheme like water , which has four phoneme In language, the smallest distinctive sound unit. Fun with language: How do you pronounce ghoti? (Turn the page after making your best guess.) morpheme In language, the smallest unit that carries meaning. grammar The system of rules governing how we can combine phonemes, morphemes, and words to produce meaningful communication. language Our spoken, written, or gestured words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Do not distribute.