Talk:List of languages by number of phonemes

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Counting diphthongs as separate phonemes[edit]

Is it really correct to claim that English has 21 vowel phonemes, as the article currently claims? I think it's at least a controversial statement because, as pointed in the article also, different sources announce different numbers — even right here on this page the original statement was 11. There is a big subject of when to treat a speech element as a phoneme versus a phoneme sequence (for example, the question in Greek is if t͡s makes a phoneme indeed, or is it just a phoneme sequence of t+s). As far as I know the consensus and the qualifying criteria here is the pronunciation length (mora) — otherwise Russian for example would count 40+ consonant phonemes, because there are many word pairs that differ just by consonant length (gemination), like in 'подать' [pɐˈdatʲ] vs. 'поддать' [pɐˈd:atʲ]. So my question is, what qualifies English diphthongs as phonemes? Because the Wikipedia page on moras says '[in Modern English] all diphthongs are bimoraic,' and therefore could be analyzed simply as phoneme sequences. There is a related topic about what makes long vowels phonemes (like /i:/ versus /ɪ/) but it's a different subject.--demis ^talk 18:54, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It could possibly be correct taken in isolation if you really stretch the definition of phoneme, but it is certainly not in a list attempting to compare languages based on the number of phonemes. There's not a single other languages on this list where diphtongues are counted as separate phonemes, it's ridiculous that to do it for English specifically Gavryy19 (talk) 15:00, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Missing languages[edit]

Many major languages are missing, Mandarin, Spanish, Russian, Greek... Caleb Stanford (talk) 14:14, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]