diaphoneme Linguistics.
(daɪəˈfəʊniːm)
[f. dia-1 + phoneme.]
The collective dialectal variants of a phoneme; = prec. Hence diaphoˈnemic a.; diaphoˈnemically adv.
| 1939 D. Jones in Proc. Third Internat. Congr. Phonetic Sci. 6 As long as the divergences are not wide enough to interfere with intelligibility, we get higher degrees of abstractions which might be termed diaphonemes. 1939 H. E. Palmer Ibid. 7 It might be appropriate to divide each degree of abstraction into..the phonemic and..the diaphonemic aspects of the abstraction. 1959 Amer. Speech XXXIV. 266 The core contrasts..can also be reached by way of the diaphonemic pattern, but a smaller set will emerge because of the phonetic integrity that is built into the diaphoneme. The criterion for assigning diaphonemically different entities to a single slot in the phonemic inventory is dialectal complementation among the contrasts. |