What is an allophone?

Definition
	An allophone is a phonetic variant of a phoneme in a particular language.

Examples (English)
	[p] and [pH] are allophones of the phoneme /p/. [t] and [tH] are allophones of the phoneme /t/.

Examples (Spanish)
	[b] and [B] are allophones of the phoneme /b/. [d] and [D] are allophones of the phoneme /d/.

See also
	What is a phone? What is complementary distribution? Comparison of morpheme-morph-allomorph and phoneme-phone-allophone

Context for this page:

Concept module: allophone
In overview module: Glossary (Linguistics): A
In modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor)
In bookshelf: Linguistics

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 5 January 2004

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