Allophone
From Free net encyclopedia
- This article is about the sense of "allophone" used in 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, Template:IPA as in pin and Template: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). Plain Template:IPA also occurs as the p in spin Template:IPA, or the second p in paper Template:IPA. Outside of contexts where plain p appears in English, speakers may hear it as b since English b is typically unaspirated.
Certain dialects of Chinese treat these two phones differently and Template:IPA is always written b in pinyin; thus, they are not allophones.
See also
da:Allofon de:Allophon es:Alófono eo:Alofono fr:Allophone gl:Alófono ko:이음 it:Allofono he:אלופון hu:Allofón nl:Allofoon no:Allofon nn:Allofon pl:Alofon ru:Аллофон sco:Allophones fi:Allofoni sv:Allofon