Phonemes and allophones Phonemes and allophones For the rest of this section, we will be looking at more subtle differences between sounds than those we have been interested in for broad transcriptions. Members of the family are called its allophones .
Different languages can have different groupings for their phonemes.
A broad transcription uses only one symbol for all allophones of the same phoneme. This is enough information to distinguish a word from other words of the language. What details you have to include in a broad transcription will depend on what language or dialect you are transcribing.