allophone.

1. A speech-sound variant of a phoneme that does not create a separate lexical contrast in that language.

2. A Canadian whose native language is neither English nor French.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• aspirated allophone
• conditioned allophone
• allophone of a phoneme

On the page

The two pronunciations were treated as allophones of one phoneme in the language.

Usage notes

Primary category: academic / formal / analytical. Lexical Type: Word. Forms: Singular allophone; plural allophones. Commonness: uncommon (editorial estimate; not a corpus frequency statistic). Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1; numbered fields keep each relevant meaning separate. Research distinction: Dictionary verifies the phonological meaning; Collins explicitly verifies the Canadian mother-tongue meaning. Neither is confused with phoneme or ethnicity. Writing functions: language analysis, conceptual distinction.