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There are many examples for allophones in languages other than English. Typically, languages with a small phoneme inventory allow for quite a lot of allophonic variation: examples are Hawaiian and Pirahã. Here are some examples (the links of language names go to the specific article or subsection on the phenomenon): Consonant allophones
Sibawayh primarily discusses imāla as a shift of /aː/ to /eː/ in the vicinity of /i/ or /iː/, an allophonic variation that can be characterized as umlaut or i-mutation. [2] Additionally, Sibawayh's imāla subsumes occurrences of a phonemic vowel /eː/ resulting from the collapse of Old Arabic triphthongs.
There is significant allophonic variation in /əʉ/, including a backed allophone [ɔʊ] before a word-final or preconsonantal /l/. The first part of this allophone is in the same position as /ɔ/, but [ɔʊ] differs from it in that it possesses an additional closing glide, which also makes it longer than /ɔ/.
R-labialization, which should not be confused with the rounding of initial /r/ described above, is a process occurring in certain dialects of English, particularly some varieties of Cockney, in which the /r/ phoneme is realized as a labiodental approximant [ʋ], in contrast to an alveolar approximant [ɹ].
There is allophonic variation of [k] with [t], [w] with [v], and [l] with [ɾ]. The [t] – [k] variation is highly unusual among the world's languages. Hawaiian has either 5 or 25 vowel phonemes, depending on how long vowels and diphthongs are analyzed. If the long vowels and diphthongs are treated as two-phoneme sequences, the total of vowel ...
When phonemes are in free variation, speakers are sometimes strongly aware of the fact (especially if such variation is noticeable only across a dialectal or sociolectal divide), and will note, for example, that tomato is pronounced differently in British and American English (/ t ə ˈ m ɑː t oʊ / and / t ə ˈ m eɪ t oʊ / respectively), [5] or that either has two pronunciations that are ...
With only five oral and no nasal or long vowels, Esperanto allows a fair amount of allophonic variation, though the distinction between /e/ and /ei̯/, and arguably /o/ and /ou̯/, is phonemic. The /v/ may be a labiodental fricative [v] or a labiodental approximant [ʋ] , again in free variation; or [w] , especially in the sequences kv and gv ...
Such spoken variations of a single phoneme are known by linguists as allophones. Linguists use slashes in the IPA to transcribe phonemes but square brackets to transcribe more precise pronunciation details, including allophones; they describe this basic distinction as phonemic versus phonetic.