Languages

A phoneme inventory is the complete set of sounds that a language uses to distinguish meaning. Two words that differ by only one sound — like "pat" and "bat" in English — are kept apart by a single phoneme. Every language has its own inventory: some use as few as 11 sounds, others more than 140.

The 500 languages below are drawn from PHOIBLE, an open academic database of phonological inventories compiled from linguistic fieldwork and published grammars. Click any language to browse its full sound system, or use the filters to explore by region or language family.