Functional load measures how much a phoneme distinguishes words in a language. Minimal pairs show the importance of certain phonemes, such as /b/ and /t/ in English, while others, like vowel sounds, have lower functional load. Stress and tone can also affect meaning in some languages but not in others.
In linguistics, functional load, or phonemic load, is the extent to which a particular phoneme helps distinguish words from one another in a language. A phoneme is the smallest portion of sound that helps convey meaning. The same phoneme may have high functional load in one language but low in another.
One way to understand this concept is to look at minimal pairs, or two words that are the same except for one phoneme. For example, “rub” and “rut” form a minimal pair because they are pronounced the same except for the final sound. Changing the /b/ sound to a /t/ sound changes the meaning of the word. In English, changing from /b/ to /t/ will always produce a different word or a nonsense word. This means that /b/ and /t/ are phonemes with a very high functional load.
Other phonemes are not that important in distinguishing words from each other. The short /i/ and short /e/ sounds sometimes, but not always, distinguish two words from each other. For example, “pin” and “pen” are a minimal pair. On the other hand, the word “friend” can be pronounced with an /i/ or /e/ sound without difference or confusion of meaning. These sounds are even interchangeable in some English dialects, and therefore have a fairly low functional load.
Similarly, which syllable is stressed sometimes changes the meaning of an English word. “Perfect” and “perfect” are a minimal pair because they are the same except for their stress. The word “aluminum”, however, can be pronounced “a lum in um” or “a lu min um”. There are relatively few minimal pairs in English that are determined by their stress, so stress is a phoneme with fairly low functional load.
Tone is another phoneme that can have different amounts of meaning attached to it in various languages. In Mandarin Chinese, changing the pitch or tone of a word or syllable can produce an entirely different, unrelated word. This is never the case in English though. Thus, pitch has a high functional load in Mandarin Chinese, but none in English.
Some languages also make a distinction between an aspirated /ph/ and an unaspirated /p/. Switching from one to the other can form a different word, so it has functional load in languages like Hindi. Many English speakers, however, cannot even hear the distinction between these two sounds. Since there are no English minimal pairs that depend on the difference between those sounds, it has no functional load.
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