allophone

9.9

A speech sound that is a small variation of another sound in a language and does not change meaning

noun
/ˈæl.ə.foʊn/

Specialized

: alófono

In linguistics, an allophone is the subtle variation of sounds that a single phoneme can produce, like the different pronunciations of 't' in 'top' and 'stop'.

Examples

Where the change is regular, as in the Bologna region, there is a merger of all allophones of /s/ and /s/, such that the former phoneme is lost.

Academic text (1993)
A production was considered correct if it was perceived as an allophone of the target phoneme and was not identified as another phoneme in English, with the exception of clear developmental errors (e.g., /w/ for /r/).

Academic text (2013)
The allophone of the English phoneme /p/ varies in aspiration, as seen in the different sounds at the beginning of 'pat' and 'spat'.
Understanding the concept of an allophone is essential for studying phonetics, as it highlights how pronunciation can differ without altering meaning.

Surface Forms

allophone singular

allophones plural

Morphology

allophone = phone (opaque) = allo + phone

The combining form 'allo-' is a specialized Greek-derived prefix meaning 'other' and is not a productive or widely-known English prefix, so learners who know 'phone' (often as 'telephone') are unlikely to infer the technical meaning.

Etymology

Allophone comes from the Greek parts allo- meaning 'other' and -phone meaning 'sound', just like in telephone. So an allophone is an 'other sound' of the same basic sound that does not change the meaning of a word.