Allophone

:This article is about the sense of "allophone" used in linguistics. For other senses, see allophone (disambiguation).

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In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. A phone is a sound that has a definite shape as a sound wave, while a phoneme is a basic group of sounds that can distinguish words (i.e. changing one phoneme in a word can produce another word); speakers of a particular language perceive a phoneme as a single distinctive sound in that language. Thus an allophone is a phone considered as a member of one phoneme.

Related Topics:
Phonetics - Phone - Phoneme

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Each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context and many times there is some sort of phonological process. Not all phonemes have significantly different allophones, but there are always minor differences in articulation from one piece of speech to the next.

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For example, {{IPA|}} as in pin and {{IPA|}} as in cap are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language because they occur in complementary distribution. English speakers generally treat these as the same sound, but they are different. The latter is unaspirated (plain): if plain {{IPA|}} is also found in words such as the second p in paper {{IPA|}}. Outside of contexts that plain p appears in English, speakers may hear it as b since English b is typically devoiced.

Related Topics:
English language - Complementary distribution - Unaspirated

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Chinese treats these two phones differently and the latter is always written as b in pinyin; thus, they are not allophones in Chinese.

Related Topics:
Chinese - Pinyin

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Similarly, English-speaking people may become aware of the difference between two allophones of the phoneme t when they consider the pronunciations of the following phrases:

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:night rate

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:nitrate

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