Allophone

Phone used to pronounce a single phoneme A simplified procedure to determine whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes. The cases on the extreme left and the extreme right are those in which the sounds are allophones. In phonology, an allophone (/ˈæləˌfoʊn/ ⓘ; from Ancient Greek ἄλλος (állos) 'other' and φωνή (phōnḗ) 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken sounds, or phones, used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive [t] (as in stop [ˈstɒp]) and the aspirated form [tʰ] (as in top [ˈtʰɒp]) are allophones for the phoneme /t/, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, [d] (as in dolor [doˈloɾ]) and [ð] (as in nada [ˈnaða]) are allophones for the phoneme /d/, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English (as in the difference between dare and there). The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound