Allophones

Phoneme is the smallest distinctive unit of lanfguage. It is called distinctive because a phoneme can distnguish meaning. phoneme is placed between slanting lines (/ /). A phoneme sometimes is realized (pronounced) into more than one representation. In other words a phoneme can have more than one phones. The voiceles stop phonemes in english ( /p/, /t/, /k/), for examples, have two variants, namely aspirated voiceles stops, and unaspirated voiceles stops. The variants of a phoneme are called allophones of the phoneme. Therefore, allophone is difined as the variant of phoneme.