The individual sounds of a language are called what?

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

Answer: (A)

At its heart, this item is about the distinction between the basic sound units of a language and the larger patterns that accompany them. The individual sounds—consonants and vowels that form words—are called segmentals. These are the discrete units that can change meaning when swapped in a word, like the difference between /p/ and /b/ in pairs such as pat vs. bat. Suprasegmentals, by contrast, are prosodic features that span across those sounds, such as stress, rhythm, and intonation, shaping how something is spoken rather than which sounds appear. Subtractive bilingualism and simplification refer to other phenomena and don’t describe the basic units of sound. So the term that best fits “the individual sounds of a language” is segmentals.