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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
Another example in English of a phonemic contrast would be the difference between leak and league; the minimal difference of voicing between [k] and [g] does lead to the two utterances being perceived as different words. On the other hand, an example that is not a phonemic contrast in English is the difference between [sit] and [siːt]. [1]
Simplified chart / decision tree to determine whether two sounds which occur in the words of a language are allophones of the same phoneme, separate phonemes, or in free variation. For explanations of terms and procedures, see articles Allophone, Complementary distribution, Minimal pair, Free variation, and Phoneme.
To take an example from American English: the phoneme /t/ in the words "table" and "cat" would, in both a phonemic orthography and in IPA phonemic transcription, be written with the same character, while phonetic transcription would make a distinction between the aspirated "t" in "table", the flap in "butter", the unaspirated "t" in "stop" and ...
For example, in Irish, an adjective undergoes lenition after a feminine singular noun: unmutated mór [mˠoːɾˠ] ' big ', mutated in bean mhór [bʲan woːɾˠ] ' a big woman ' In Welsh, a noun undergoes soft mutation when it is the direct object of a finite verb: unmutated beic [bəik] "bike", mutated in Prynodd y ddynes feic.
In those languages, therefore, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, in Icelandic, [kʰ] is the first sound of kátur, meaning "cheerful", but [k] is the first sound of gátur, meaning "riddles". Icelandic, therefore, has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/.
Examples include the loss (in most dialects) of the [ç] and [x] sounds still reflected by the gh in words like night and taught, and the splitting of voiced and voiceless allophones of fricatives into separate phonemes (such as the two different phonemes represented by th ).
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents.In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.