The individual sounds of a language are called what?

• A. Segmental
• B. Subtractive bilingualism
• C. Suprasegmentals
• D. Simplification

Answer: (A)

The individual sounds of a language are called segments. In phonology, segments refer to the consonants and vowels that can be combined to form words, the concrete building blocks of pronunciation. A lot of what you hear in speech—which sounds appear and how they contrast—is captured at this level. In contrast, suprasegmentals cover features that extend over multiple segments, like stress, intonation, tone, and rhythm, which shape meaning and flow across sequences of sounds. The other terms don’t describe the basic sound units: subtractive bilingualism is about language development in multilingual contexts, and simplification isn’t the term for the specific units of sound.