In linguistics, what is the term for the smallest meaningful unit in a language?
💡 Explanation:
A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that carries semantic meaning or a grammatical function. It cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful parts. For example, 'un-' in 'unhappy' and 'dog' in 'dogs' are both morphemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound, a grapheme is the smallest unit in a writing system, and a syllable is a unit of pronunciation.