Diaphoneme

Common card · No. 483483

A diaphoneme is an abstract phonological unit that identifies a correspondence between related sounds of two or more varieties of a language or language cluster. For example, New York may be transcribed phonemically as /nuː ˈjɔrk/ in American English and /njuː ˈjɔːk/ in Received Pronunciation. A diaphonemic transcription such as /njuː ˈjɔrk/ would cover both dialects, as it includes the /j/ absent in American English and the /r/ missing from Received Pronunciation; while neither is described exactly, both are derivable from the diaphonemic transcription. Diaphonology studies the realization of diaphones across dialects, and is important to evaluate if an orthography is adequate for more than one dialect of a language. In historical linguistics, it is concerned with the reflexes of an ancestral phoneme as a language splits into dialects, such as the modern realizations of Old English /oː/. The concept goes back to the 1930s. The word diaphone was originally used with the same meaning as...

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