Minor allophone

From Apics

By major allophone, we mean an allophone that occurs in about half the tokens or more often, while a minor allophone is an allophone that occurs in less than half of the tokens. For example, in Principense, the phoneme /s/ has two allophones: [ʃ] (before a high front vowel) and [s] (elsewhere). Thus, [s] is a major allophone, and [ʃ] is a minor allophone.

Note that we are asking for a segment inventory here, not (strictly speaking) for a phoneme inventory (although we loosely equated segments with phonemes in the guidelines). Phonemes are abstract entities that cannot be readily compared across languages, at least not by simply specifying the phonemes on an IPA chart. It would have been possible to ask the contributors to only give us one allophone per phoneme, namely the "dominant allophone" (this would have to be defined in a specific way). Instead, we chose to ask for the kinds of sounds that occur in a language, regardless of the way they are grouped into phonemes. Note that we do not ask you to say for a given segment which phoneme it belongs to -- we felt that this was too complicated, and clearly beyond what would be readily comparable.

Note also that we use the term allophone in the sense 'phonetic realization', i.e. we find it normal to say that a phoneme has only a single allophone (i.e. is realized uniformly without allophonic variation). Some linguists call a phonetic realization of a phoneme an allophone only if there is some variation, i.e. if there are at least two allophones.

Our definition of major and minor allophone allows for a situation where a phoneme has two major allophones (namely when there are exactly two allophones, and they both occur equally frequently). It also allows for a situation in which a phoneme has no major allophones, e.g. when it has five allophones, each of which occurs about one fifth of the time.

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