Phonemic transcription uses symbols to represent sounds in speech, focusing on the smallest part of a word’s sound that can affect its meaning. It is different from phonetic transcription, which provides less detail. Phonetic transcriptions are used in dictionaries and can be broad or narrow, while phonemic transcription does not distinguish between allophones.
Phonemic transcription is a system used to use letters or symbols to represent sounds in speech. It is probably different from the better known phonetic transcription. Phonetic transcription provides less detail than phonetic transcription and only aims to cover the necessary information to avoid confusion.
The basis of phonetic and phonemic transcription is the phoneme. This is defined as the smallest part of a word’s sound that can be clearly defined as a separate sound that could affect the meaning of what a person says. This can vary from language to language. For example, in English the difference between “d” and “t” in “dime” and “time” should be clearly distinguishable and is sufficient to change the meaning. In some other languages the two sounds would have been pronounced the same, meaning the two words could not be distinguished.
Phonetic transcriptions attempt to represent sounds as letters and symbols, allowing people to know how a word is pronounced without hearing it. The most common place people will see a phonetic transcription is in dictionaries. Many transcriptions use a standardized set of symbols, which means people can read and understand the pronunciation of words regardless of the language they speak.
Such transcripts are usually classified as broad or narrow. Simply put, the tighter a transcription, the more accurately the symbols represent the actual sound of the pronunciation. The downside is that this usually requires more symbols, which lengthens the transcription and decreases the number of people who can use the system because they know all the symbols. Phonemic transcription can be classified as very broad phonetic transcription or non-phonetic transcription. This is because it simply transmits sound and provides little or no additional information.
In particular, phonemic transcription does not distinguish between allophones, which are two technically different sounds, but where this difference is not a problem for communication. For example, the “p” sounds in “penny” and “spend” are technically pronounced a different way, and so would usually be listed differently in phonetic transcription. If the two sounds were interchanged, the two words might sound slightly strange to a listener, but they would still be clear and neither would be confused with another word. This means they are allophone and therefore are both listed the same in a phonemic transcription.
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