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Definition 2024
diaphone
diaphone
English
Noun
diaphone (plural diaphones)
- A kind of organ pipe.
- A sound signal which produces sound by means of a slotted piston moved back and forth by compressed air.
Etymology 2
Noun
diaphone (plural diaphones)
- (linguistics) A particular dialectal variant of a phoneme.
- All the dialectal variants of a phoneme, considered as a whole.
Related terms
Quotations
- 1929: F. W. Taylor, the Orthography of African Languages (in Journal of the Royal African Society)
- I may read “gas” as “gas,” and you as “gahs”; you may say “aspect” and I may say “ahspect.” Such diaphones, as they are called in phonetics, must always be spelled in but one way only;
- 1930: Practical Orthography of African Languages
- The term Diaphone is used to denote a normal sound together with the variants of it heard from different speakers of the same language.
- 1932: Daniel Jones, Outline of English Phonetics
- The term diaphone is used to denote a sound used by one group of speakers together with other sounds which replace it in the pronunciation of other speakers.
- 1950: Daniel Jones, The Phoneme
- Overlapping of diaphones is ... especially liable to happen when a sound lies near the limit of a diaphonic ‘area’.
- 1953: William J. Entwistle, Aspects of Language
- The diaphones are also found in the speech of a single individual.
- 1961: Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid, The Pronunciation of English in Atlantic States
- The regional and social dissemination of the diaphones of stressed vowels.