In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds (phones) that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word. Speakers of a particular language perceive a phoneme as a distinctive sound in that language. An allophone isn't distinctive, but rather a variant of a phoneme; changing the allophone won't change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-nat… (More on Allophone)