"Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things."

Flora Lewis

What is the Difference between a Phoneme, an Allophone and a Sound?

This article is concerned with the notions of sound, phoneme and allophone.

What's the difference between the terms 'sound', 'phoneme' and 'allophone'?

When we talk about the sounds of a language, the term 'sound' can be rather ambiguous because it can be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, we can say that the sounds are different when they have different place of articulation (e.g: /t/ tree and /θ/ three), but at the same time we cannot say that when the sounds have the same place of articulation they are the same (e.g.: 'let me' and 'let them' ) because we can hear a vivid difference between /t/ pronunciation in the first case and /t/ pronunciation in the second case. That's why the linguists have introduced two separate termes to explain the notion of 'sound': phoneme and allophone.

The term 'phoneme' is used to mean 'sound' in its contrastive sense, that is when we compare two quite different sounds (e.g: /m/ in 'me' and /w/ in 'we'). The opposition of phonemes in the same phonetic environment helps to indentify the meaning of the words.

That is why is it of great importance for each English learner to know the difference between the phonemes and to pronounce them in a correct way to avoid phonetic mistakes that may lead to misunderstanding in the future.

(to see additional examples of vowel and consonant oppositions click here)

'Allophone' is used for the sounds which are variants of one phoneme. Each phoneme is represented by numerous allophones that occur in different positions in the words (e.g.: /s/ in stop and /s/ in keeps) as a result of the preceding or following sounds influence on a phoneme.

The linguists distinguish two major types of allophones: principal and subsidiary.

The allophones which do not undergo any distinguishable changes in the chain of speech are called principal. Principal allophones retain their articulator characteristics. Let us have a look at the example of the principal allophone /d/ that when no effected by the articulation of the preceding or following sounds is a plosive, fore lingual apical, alveolar, lenis stop (e.g.: door, dear, darn, down, do).

At the same time if there are changes in the articulation of phonemes under the influence of the neighboring sounds, either preceding or following the phoneme, in different phonetic situations they are called subsidiary. That is why in such cases we deal with the articulatory modifications of a phoneme in various phonetic contexts.

At the same time we should take into consideration that allophones of the same phoneme possess similar articulatory features and may frequently show considerable phonetic differences.

Let us have a look at the example of the allophones of /d/ phoneme:

1. palatalized allophone of /d/ before front vowels and the sonorant: deal, day, did, did you;

2. /d/ that is pronounced without any plosion before another stop: bedtime, bad pain, good doll;

3. /d/ that is pronounced with the nasal plosion before the nasal sonorants /n/ and /m/: sudden, admit, could not, could meet;

4. /d/ that is pronounced with the lateral plosion before the lateral sonorant /l/: middle, badly, bad light;

5. /d/ that becomes post alveolar when followed by /r/: dry, dream;

6. /d/ that becomes dental when followed by the interdentally /θ/ and /ð/: breadth, lead the way, good thing);

7. labialized /d/ when followed by the labial /w/: dweller, dwarf;

8. partially devoiced /d/ in the initial position: dog, dean;

9. fully voiced /d/ in the intervocalic position or when followed by a sonorant: order, leader, driver;

10. voiceless /d/ in the word-final position: road, raised, old.

These are not all of the allophones of the /d/ phoneme, the list of them could be easily extended.

Published in Guidelines for Phonetics
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