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 in American English and in Received Pronunciation. A diaphonemic transcription such as would cover both dialects, as it includes the absent in American English and the 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 .
The concept goes back to the 1930s. The word diaphone was originally used with the same meaning as diaphoneme, but was later repurposed to refer to any of the particular variants, making the relationship between diaphoneme and diaphone analogous to that between phoneme and allophone.
Usage The term diaphone first appeared in usage by phoneticians like Daniel Jones, citing and Harold E. Palmer., citing states that Jones credited Palmer with using the term in print first, though citing , credits Jones with pushing the concept. Jones, who was more interested in transcription and coping with dialectal variation than with how cognitively real the phenomenon is, originally used diaphone to refer to the family of sounds that are realized differently depending on dialect but that speakers consider to be the same; an individual dialect or speaker's realization of this diaphone was called a diaphonic variant. Because of confusion related to usage, Jones later coined the term diaphoneme to refer to his earlier sense of diaphone (the class of sounds) and used diaphone to refer to the variants.This is how the terms are used in (cited in ), , and uses diaphone in this sense but uses phoneme in place of diaphoneme.
A diaphonemic inventory is a specific diasystem (a term popularized by Uriel Weinreich) that superimposes dialectal contrasts to access all contrasts in all dialects that are included. This consists of a shared core inventory, citing and, when accounting for contrasts not made by all dialects (whether they are historical contrasts that have been lost or innovative ones not made in all varieties ), only as many contrasts as are needed. refers to this distinction as "differences in phonetic realization" and "differences between accents", respectively. The diaphonemic approach gets away from the assumption that linguistic communities are homogeneous, allows multiple varieties to be described in the same terms (something important for situations where people have abilities in more than one variety),, citing and helps in ascertaining where speakers make diaphonic identifications as a result of similarities and differences between the varieties involved.
The linguistic variable, a similar concept presented by William Labov, refers to features with variations that are referentially identical but carry social and stylistic meaning., pointing to This could include phonological, as well as morphological and syntactic phenomena. Labov also developed variable rules analysis, with variable rules being those that all members of a speech community (presumably) possess but vary in the frequency of use., pointing to The latter concept met resistance from scholars for a number of reasons including the argument from critics that knowledge of rule probabilities was too far from speakers' competence.See for a more in-depth discussion about communicative competence in relation to variable rules. Because of these problems, use of variable rules analysis died down by the end of the 1980s. Nevertheless, the linguistic variable is still used in sociolinguistics. For Labov, grouping variants together was justified by their tendency to fluctuate between each other within the same set of words., citing For example, Labov presented the variants (among New York speakers) of the vowel of bad or dance: Phonetic value Score 1 2 3 4 5 6
The different phonetic values were assigned numerical values that were then used in an overall score index.
Overdifferentiation is when phonemic distinctions from one's primary language are imposed on the sounds of the second system where they are not required; underdifferentiation of phonemes occurs when two sounds of the second system are not maintained because they are not present in the primary system., citing
Dialectology Inspired by , Uriel Weinreich first advocated the use of diasystems in structural dialectology, and suggested that such a system would represent a higher level of abstraction that can unite related dialects into a single description and transcription. While phonemic systems describe the speech of a single variety, diaphonemic systems can reflect the contrasts that are not made by all varieties being represented. The way these differ can be shown in an example from northern English varieties;Example adapted from . some English varieties contrast the vowel of late () with that of wait or eight (). Other English varieties contrast the vowel of late or wait () with that of eight (). This non-overlapping pair of phonemes from two different varieties can be reconciled by positing three different diaphonemes: A first diaphoneme for words like late (), a second diaphoneme for words like wait (), and a third diaphoneme for words like eight (). Words Phonemes Diaphonemes Variety A Variety B late wait eight
The desire of building a diasystem to accommodate all English dialects, combined with a blossoming generative phonology, prompted American dialectologists to attempt the construction of an "overall system" of English phonology by analyzing dialectal distinctions as differences in the ordering of phonological rules as well as in the presence or absence of such rules. even went so far as to claim that principled description of interdialectal code-switching would be impossible without such rules.
An example of this concept is presented in with a phonological difference between Castilian and Uruguayan Spanish:
Castilian Uruguayan Gloss 'class' 'classes'
Without the use of ordered rules, Uruguayan Spanish could be interpreted as having two additional phonemes and morphophonemic vowel alternation with its plural marker. Attempting to construct a diasystem that encodes such a variety would thus represent all Spanish varieties as having seven vowel phonemes (with contrasts only in final position). Due to both varieties having closed allophones of mid vowels in open syllables and open allophones in closed syllables, using ordered rules minimizes the differences so that the underlying form for both varieties is the same and Uruguayan Spanish simply has a subsequent rule that deletes at the end of a syllable; constructing a diaphonemic system thus becomes a relatively straightforward process. suggests that the rules needed to account for dialectal differences, even if not psychologically real, may be historically accurate.
The nature of an overall system for English was controversial: the analysis in and point to earlier works by these authors as approaching the same goal but in less detail was popular amongst American linguists for a time (in the face of criticism, particularly from Hans Kurathe.g. ); James Sleddparticularly in put forth his own diaphonemic system that accommodated Southern American English; both and modified the scheme of The Sound Pattern of English by focusing on the diaphoneme, believing that it could address neutralizations better than structuralist approaches; and The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (PEAS) by Kurath and McDavid combined several dialects into one system transcribed in the IPA., citing More recently, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language makes use of a diaphonemic transcription of Standard English so that examples can be expressed concisely without favoring any particular accent.See explanation here
argued that fell short in accurately representing dialects because their methodology involved attempting to create a diasystem before establishing the relevant component phonemic systems. argues a similar problem occurs in the study of Hopi where transfer of training leads phoneticians to fit features of a dialect under study into the system of dialects already studied.
Beginning with linguists attempting to account for dialectal differences have generally distinguished between three types: Phonological: the phonemic inventories and phonotactic restrictions Phonetic: how a given phoneme is realized phonetically (RP and Australian English, for example, have almost the same exact phoneme system but with notably different realizations of the vowelsSee , cited in ). This distinction covers differences in the range of allophonic variation. Incidence: one phoneme rather than another occurs in a given word or group of words (such as grass, which has the same vowel of farce in RP but not in GA.)
Wells, expanded on this by splitting up the phonological category into "systemic" differences (those of inventory) and "structural" differences (those of phonotactics).
In addition, both Wells and Weinreich mention realizational overlap, wherein the same phone (or a nearly identical one) corresponds to different phonemes, depending on accent. Some examples: Autistic in Canadian English overlaps with the way speakers of Received Pronunciation say artistic: Impossible in General American overlaps with RP impassable: notes a similar phenomenon in Western Pennsylvania, where occurs either as the vowel of ashes or as the vowel of tiger but no speaker merges the two vowels (i.e. a speaker who says will not say ).
Realizational overlap occurs between the three dialects of Huastec, which have the same phonological system even though cognate words often do not have the same reflexes of this system. For example, while the Central and Potosino dialects both have ch and ts-type sounds, the words they are found in are reversed:
+Huastec diaphonemes Diaphoneme Word Otontepec Central Potosino 'snake' 'flea' 'pigweed' 'comb'
Yuen Ren Chao created a diaphonemic transcription of major Chinese varieties, in both Latin and Chinese character versions, called "General Chinese". It originally (1927) covered the various Wu dialects, but by 1983 had expanded to cover the major dialects of Mandarin, Yue, Hakka, and Min as well. Apart from a few irregularities, GC can be read equally well in any of those dialects, and several others besides.
Quranic Arabic uses a diaphonemic writing system that indicates both the pronunciation in Mecca, the western dialect the Quran was written in, and that of eastern Arabia, the prestige dialect of pre-Islamic poetry. For example, final was pronounced something like in Mecca, and written ي , while it had merged with in eastern Arabia and was written as ا . In order to accommodate both pronunciations, the basic letter of Meccan Arabic was used, but the diacritic was dropped: ى. Similarly, the glottal stop had been lost in Meccan Arabic in all positions but initially, so the Meccan letters were retained with the eastern glottal stop indicated with a diacritic hamza.Catherine Bateson, 1967, Arabic Language Handbook, p 75 ff.Versteegh, 1997, The Arabic Language, p 40 ff, 56 ff
Bilingualism