For many years, now, and particularly within the last decade, there has been increasing use of the term ‘phoneme’, ‘wenn man sich auch nicht immer über seine definition einig ist’. Parallel to this increased use of the term, there has been the re-emergence of a concept of some unit of spoken language, a unit which is not the same as a ‘sound of speech’. It has long been known to phoneticians and linguists in general that the sounds of speech, even within the narrowest restrictions of time and place, even within the usage of a single individual, present an almost infinite variety. Scarcely any two speakers of a given dialect pronounce the same word exactly alike, either as to their articulatory movements or as to the sound-waves which those movements set up in the atmosphere. And yet, within the communicative and expressive medium, those (articulatorily and acoustically) slightly different processes are still the same word; and the ‘sounds’ which comprise this same word are in some way the same sounds, within the frame of that communicative and expressive medium which is the language of the community. It is the recognition of this sameness, this effective unity, which has found expression in the term ‘phoneme’ as a unit of spoken language.