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File:Phoneme-allophone-determination-chart.svg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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allophone

thumb|A simplified procedure to determine whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes. The cases on the extreme left and the extreme right are those in which the sounds are allophones.|class=skin-invert-image

AI overview

An allophone is a variation of a sound in a language that doesn't change the meaning of words—for example, the different ways you might pronounce the "p" sound in "spin" versus "pin." Understanding allophones matters because it helps linguists figure out which sound differences are actually important to a language's meaning and which are just natural variations in how people speak.

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Wikidata facts

Image: Phoneme-allophone-determination-chart.svg

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~14 min read

Article

11 sections

Contents

History of concept
Complementary and free-variant allophones
Allotone
Examples
English
Rules for English consonant allophones
Other languages
Representing a phoneme with an allophone
See also
References
External links

In phonology, an allophone (; ) is one of multiple possible spoken sounds, or , used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive (as in stop ) and the aspirated form (as in top ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, (as in dolor ) and (as in nada ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English (as in the difference between dare and there).