Allophone
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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.
Each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context. 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 spin 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: it sounds a little more like the b of English. This may be noticed by English speakers if they hear the unaspired p without the preceding s. The s is the usual context for the unaspirated allophone.
Chinese treats these two phones differently and the latter is written as b in pinyin; thus, they are not allophones in Chinese.
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:
- night rate
- nitrate
See also
es:Alófono eo:Alofono fr:Allophone ko:이음 it:Allofono hu:Allofón nl:Allofoon nn:Allofon pl:Alofon ru:Аллофон sv:Allofon