An
emic unit is a type of
abstract object analyzed in
linguistics and related fields. Kinds of emic units are generally denoted by terms with the suffix
-eme, such as
phoneme,
grapheme, and
morpheme. An emic unit is defined by Nöth (1995) as "an invariant form obtained from the reduction of a class of variant forms to a limited number of abstract units". The variant forms are called
etic units (from
phonetic). This means that a given emic unit is considered to be a single underlying object that may have a number of different observable "surface" representations.