A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that has meaning in a language. For the books in English shows that something is so the sound Isl has meaning. Languages plural, of them meaning languages For use a different range of sounds and not all important one in English, where it helps example, the distinction between us and Ishi is an distinguish between words such as so and show, sack and sore and short. But in Cantopese, s you can use either Hsu or Ishl in words without changing their meaning, Cantonese they are not two separate p 7 phone of a language