Allophone
- For other uses, 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.
We may distinguish complementary allophones, which are distributed regularly within the idiolect of the same speaker according to phonetic environment, from free variants, which are a matter of personal habit or regional accent.
In the case of complementary allophones, 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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Examples in English
For example, [pʰ] as in pin and [p] 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 [p] also occurs as the p in spin [spɪn], or the second p in paper [pʰeɪ.pɚ]. Outside of contexts where plain p appears in English, speakers may hear it as b since English b is typically devoiced.
Certain Chinese languages treat these two phones differently, for example in Mandarin, [p] is always written b in pinyin; thus, they are not allophones.
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: IPA [naɪtˀ.ɹeɪtˀ]
- Nitrate: IPA [ˈnaɪˌtʃɹeɪtˀ]
"Elsewhere" condition
When there are two allophones for one phoneme in a given language, linguists use the "elsewhere condition" to determine which is the original allophone and which is the variation. For example, to determine when oral and nasalized vowels occur in English, the pattern is noted that all vowels are oral, except when when the vowel comes before a nasal within the same syllable. Therefore, according to the "elsewhere condition", nasalized vowels are allophones of their oral counterparts.
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Categories
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