Allophone

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

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.

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.

For example, as in pin and 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). Plain also occurs as the p in spin , or the second p in paper . Outside of contexts where plain p appears in English, speakers may hear it as b since English b is typically unaspirated.

Certain Chinese languages treat these two phones differently, for example in Mandarin, is always written b in pinyin; thus, they are not allophones.

See also

*List of phonetics topics