allophonen

Allophony refers to the systematic variation of a single phoneme into multiple phonetically distinct realizations, called allophones. The term allophonen is a plural form sometimes encountered in non-English usage; in English, the standard plural is allophones. Allophones are not used to distinguish words; they do not create phonemic contrasts, but are conditioned by surrounding sounds or word position.

Allophones come in two broad patterns: complementary distribution, where each allophone occurs in a specific environment and never in the other; and free variation, where the same phoneme can be pronounced as different allophones without changing meaning.

English provides classic examples: the /p/ in "pat" is aspirated [pʰ], while the /p/ in "spin" is unaspirated [p]. Both are allophones of the phoneme /p/. In American English, the alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ become a voiced-voiceless tap [ɾ] when between vowels in unstressed syllables; this is an allophonic realization, not a different phoneme. German final obstruents often undergo devoicing at the end of words, so /g/ and /z/ surfaces may appear as [k] and [s], respectively. Some languages also show length or quality changes in vowels or consonants conditioned by context, which count as allophony.

Allophony is a central concept in phonology and phonetics, describing how languages map abstract phonemes to concrete speech sounds depending on context. The study helps explain pronunciation variation, orthography-to-sound correspondences, and why different languages can have distinct but systematic sound patterns for the same underlying phonemes.