Editing Allophone (section)

== Representing a phoneme with an allophone ==
Since phonemes are abstractions of speech sounds, not the sounds themselves, they have no direct [[phonetic transcription]]. When they are realized without much allophonic variation, a simple [[broad transcription]] is used. However, when there are complementary allophones of a phoneme, the allophony becomes significant and things then become more complicated. Often, if only one of the allophones is simple to transcribe, in the sense of not requiring diacritics, that representation is chosen for the phoneme.

However, there may be several such allophones, or the linguist may prefer greater precision than that allows. In such cases, a common convention is to use the "elsewhere condition" to decide the allophone that stands for the phoneme. The "elsewhere" allophone is the one that remains once the conditions for the others are described by phonological rules.

For example, English has both oral and nasal allophones of its vowels. The pattern is that vowels are nasal only before a nasal consonant in the same syllable; elsewhere, they are oral. Therefore, by the "elsewhere" convention, the oral allophones are considered basic, and nasal vowels in English are considered to be allophones of oral phonemes.

In other cases, an allophone may be chosen to represent its phoneme because it is more common in the languages of the world than the other allophones, because it reflects the historical origin of the phoneme, or because it gives a more balanced look to a chart of the phonemic inventory.

An alternative, which is commonly used for [[archiphoneme]]s, is to use a capital letter, such as /N/ for [m], [n], [ŋ].

In rare cases, a linguist may represent phonemes with abstract symbols, such as [[dingbat]]s, to avoid privileging any particular allophone.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Hale |first1=Mark |title=Marshallese phonology, the phonetics-phonology interface and historical linguistics |journal=The Linguistic Review |date=2000 |volume=17 |issue=2–4 |pages=241–258|doi=10.1515/tlir.2000.17.2-4.241 |s2cid=143601901 }}</ref>