English

Noun

diaphone ‎(plural diaphones)

1. A kind of organ pipe.
2. A sound signal which produces sound by means of a slotted piston moved back and forth by compressed air.

Etymology 2

Dia(lect) + phone

Noun

diaphone ‎(plural diaphones)

1. (linguistics) A particular dialectal variant of a phoneme.
2. All the dialectal variants of a phoneme, considered as a whole.

Related terms

• diaphoneme
• diaphonic

Quotations

• 1929: F. W. Taylor, the Orthography of African Languages (in Journal of the Royal African Society)

  I may read “gas” as “gas,” and you as “gahs”; you may say “aspect” and I may say “ahspect.” Such diaphones, as they are called in phonetics, must always be spelled in but one way only;

• 1930: Practical Orthography of African Languages

  The term Diaphone is used to denote a normal sound together with the variants of it heard from different speakers of the same language.

• 1932: Daniel Jones, Outline of English Phonetics

  The term diaphone is used to denote a sound used by one group of speakers together with other sounds which replace it in the pronunciation of other speakers.

• 1950: Daniel Jones, The Phoneme

  Overlapping of diaphones is ... especially liable to happen when a sound lies near the limit of a diaphonic ‘area’.

• 1953: William J. Entwistle, Aspects of Language

  The diaphones are also found in the speech of a single individual.

• 1961: Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid, The Pronunciation of English in Atlantic States

  The regional and social dissemination of the diaphones of stressed vowels.