The different sounds that can represent one phoneme in the speech of a given speaker or language; that is, they are perceived under certain circumstances to be the same phoneme Allophonic systems can vary from speaker to speaker or more especially from language to language e g , /s/ can be represented by the allophones /s/ and /z/ (sound or sounds)
The various phonetic realizations of a phoneme which are determined by the phonetic environment are called allophones The / k / sound in ceep is slightly different than in coop, because of the difference in the following vowels Note that allophones do not bring about a change in meaning