Allophonie

Allophonie refers to the variation of a single phoneme into multiple phonetic realizations, known as allophones. These allophones are different sounds that do not change the meaning of a word, so they are not considered separate phonemes in the language. In a given language, the distribution of allophones is typically predictable: certain sounds occur in specific environments, while others appear in different contexts. When allophonic variation is predictable and non-contrastive, the phoneme remains the same despite surface differences.

There are two main patterns of allophony. In complementary distribution, different allophones occur in mutually exclusive environments, so they never appear in the same context. For example, a language might have one allophone of a stop phoneme aspirated at word-initial position and another unaspirated after an initial s-cluster; these variants never alternate in the same environment. In free variation, different allophones can appear in the same context without changing meaning, often depending on speaker, dialect, or subtle phonetic preference.

Common examples include aspirated versus unaspirated stops in English, where the phoneme /p/ can be realized as [pʰ] in stressed syllables like pat and as [p] after an s in spin. Another well-known case is the dark versus light l, where the same phoneme /l/ is realized as a velarized [ɫ] in syllable codas. Allophony illustrates how phonetic detail interacts with phonological structure in natural languages.

The concept derives from combining Greek allos “other” and phone “sound,” and is a central topic in phonology and linguistic theory.