What is a phonemic inventory?

• A. A list of all phones an individual can produce.
• B. A repertoire of phonemes used in all contexts.
• C. The repertoire of phonemes used contrastively to distinguish meaning.
• D. The total number of syllables a person can utter.

Answer: (C)

The main idea is the set of sound units that actually distinguish words in a language. A phonemic inventory is the collection of phonemes—the abstract sound units—whose differences can change meaning. If you swap one phoneme for another, you usually get a different word, which is what makes those sounds part of the inventory.

This is different from listing every possible sound a speaker can make (phones), which would be a phonetic inventory and includes many surface variants that don’t change meaning. It’s also not about every context a sound might appear in; it’s about the sounds that contrast with one another to signal different meanings. For example, the contrast between /p/ and /b/ in words like pit vs. bit shows why both are included in the phonemic inventory. In English, aspirated and unaspirated variants of /p/ are allophones and don’t form separate phonemes, so they aren’t counted as separate items in the phonemic inventory. The total number of syllables isn’t the focus here.