"In phonology, an allophone is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language."
A variant of a phoneme that occurs in a particular phonetic environment.
Allophones: The different ways that sounds can be pronounced depending on their context and position in a word.
Phonemes: The basic units of sound in a language, which can be distinguished from other sounds in the same language.
Prosody: The patterns of intonation, stress, and rhythm that make up the melody of a language.
Syllables: The units of sound that make up words, which are typically made up of one or more vowels and one or more consonants.
Articulatory phonetics: The study of how speech sounds are produced by the physical movements of the tongue, lips, and other articulators in the mouth.
Acoustic phonetics: The study of the physical properties of sound waves and how they relate to the perception of speech sounds.
Phonological rules: The set of rules that govern the distribution of sounds in a language, including the conditions under which allophones are produced.
Language variation: The ways in which different speakers of a language may use different pronunciations or dialects of a language.
Speech perception: The cognitive process by which we interpret the sounds that we hear into meaningful words and phrases.
Historical linguistics: The study of how the sounds and structure of a language change over time.
Free variation: This occurs when two or more sounds can be pronounced interchangeably without affecting the meaning or grammaticality of a word or utterance.
Complementary distribution: This occurs when two or more sounds only appear in specific contexts and cannot substitute for one another.
Aspirated and unaspirated: This occurs with voiceless stop consonants like /p/, /t/, and /k/ where the first is pronounced with a puff of air while the second doesn't have any.
Nasalization and denasalization: This occurs when a vowel before or after a nasal consonant becomes nasalised, or when a nasal vowel is pronounced without nasalisation.
Length: This occurs when vowels or consonants are pronounced for a longer duration than usual, influencing the meaning of a word or utterance.
Velarization: This occurs when a sound is pronounced with the back of the tongue raised towards the velum, such as the /l/ in "milk.".
Labialization: This occurs when a sound is pronounced with rounded lips, usually with labial consonants like /p/, /b/, and /m/.
Rhotacism: This occurs when a sound is pronounced like the rhotic consonant /r/, such as in Irish English, where "car" is pronounced as "cor.".
Flapping: This occurs when the alveolar consonants /t/ and /d/ are pronounced with a brief tap or flap instead of a complete stop, such as in "latter" pronounced as "ladder.".
Glottalization: This occurs when a sound is pronounced with a constriction or closing of the glottis, such as in the glottal stop in Cockney English "water" pronounced as "wata".
"...the voiceless plosive [t] (as in stop [ˈstɒp]) and the aspirated form [tʰ] (as in top [ˈtʰɒp]) are allophones for the phoneme /t/..."
"...these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Thai."
"[d] (as in dolor [doˈloɾ]) and [ð] (as in nada [ˈnaða]) are allophones for the phoneme /d/..."
"...these two are considered to be different phonemes in English..."
"The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants..."
"...but some allophones occur in free variation."
"Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word..."
"...but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible."
"Native speakers of a given language perceive one phoneme in the language as a single distinctive sound..."
"...and are 'both unaware of and even shocked by' the allophone variations that are used to pronounce single phonemes."
"Allophone (...) from the Greek ἄλλος, állos, 'other' and φωνή, phōnē, 'voice, sound'"
"An allophone is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – or signs..."
"The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context..."
"...such allophones being called positional variants..."
"...these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Thai."
"Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word..."
"...the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible."
"Native speakers of a given language perceive one phoneme in the language as a single distinctive sound..."
"...and are 'both unaware of and even shocked by' the allophone variations that are used to pronounce single phonemes."