Phonemes Linguists classify the speech sounds used in a language into a number of abstract categories called phonemes. English, for example, has 44 phonemes, although the number varies according to the dialect of the speaker and the system of the classification. Phonemes are abstract categories which allow us to group together subsets of speech sounds. Even though no two speech sounds, or phones, are identical, all of the phones classified into one phoneme category are similar enough so that they convey the same meaningPhonemes ◼ Linguists classify the speech sounds used in a language into a number of abstract categories called phonemes. English, for example, has 44 phonemes, although the number varies according to the dialect of the speaker and the system of the classification. Phonemes are abstract categories which allow us to group together subsets of speech sounds. Even though no two speech sounds, or phones, are identical, all of the phones classified into one phoneme category are similar enough so that they convey the same meaning