Phonemes and Allophones

An analogyBy Jacqueline Moenssens Ramsey

October 14, 2010

• Students taking Spanish linguistics as undergraduate students often struggle with understanding the concept of phonemes and allophones.

• They are told that phonemes are the core sounds of the sound system of the language and are taught to use minimal pairs as a test of whether a sound is a phoneme or not.

• In October 2010, when asked to please explain the concept again, in English, an analogy occurred to me that ended up being very helpful to my students.

• To explain phonemes I had been using terms like the “core sounds” or “key sounds” in the language that change the meaning of a word if we swap them with a different “core sound” or “key sound”—but my students did not really understand the concept.

My analogy to explain phonemes

• I wrote ROY G BIV on the board.

• My students immediately recognized it as the acronym for the colors of the rainbow.

• I explained that phonemes are like the ROY G BIV colors…the basic colors of the rainbow that we readily recognize for the colors they are.

• When we look at a color, we don’t wonder if it is red or green or blue. We know which it is.

• Likewise, we know the difference between certain sounds in our language. We recognize the different sounds in initial position in the following words as being different and as changing the meaning of the word:

Bat / cat / hat / sat / mat / gnat

• The initial sounds are different AND CONTRASTING sounds.

• The ROY G BIV colors of the rainbow, the “root” or “base” colors, if you will, can occur in a very wide range of tones, shades, and hues. Yet when we see a hue of green we do not normally confuse it with a hue of indigo or orange. We can connect the hue back to one of the ROY G BIV colors.

• Each of the following are different hues of green, but we recognize all of them as being variations of green:

Allophones

• Allophones are like the different shades and hues of one the ROY G BIV colors. We know which core color they represent.

• When we hear different variations of pronunciation of a phoneme, we still recognize the core sound or phoneme.

An example

• In Spanish, the phoneme /d/ can be pronounced with either of the following allophones (variations): – [d] The voiced dental occlusive– [đ] The voiced dental fricative

(In reality there are more than two allophones, but for the sake of simplicity we will just include these for now.)

• The two different allophones of /d/ that we have mentioned are technically not interchangeable. There are environments in which we should use the occlusive and other environments in which we should use the fricative.

• If we use the incorrect allophone, the listener will notice the difference (and may make judgments about our linguistic knowledge and ability)…just as we can see that the green in the rainbow doesn’t seem quite right in the rainbow because it is a different hue than the other ROY G BIV colors.

And just like a lime green bush in this picture wouldn’t look quite right.

• But the listener would still understand which “core sound” (color of the rainbow) we were using. The listener would know we were using the phoneme /d/.

• The word “pido” would be understood whether it was pronounced with the correct allophone [pi.đo] or a different allophone [pi.do].

• The listener would know we were saying “pido” and not “pino” or “piso” or a word with some other phoneme.

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.