1938 B. L. Whorf Lang. Thought & Reality (1956) 126 Allophones or positional variants.

1941 G. L. Trager in Language 17 170 The first allophone (subphonemic variant) of the j phoneme.

1949 C. E. Bazell in Archivum Linguisticum 1 4 Two comparisons are familiar, the one between the allophones of a phoneme and the alternants of a morpheme, the other between the allophones and the semantic variants of the morphemic Gesamtbedeutung.

1957 S. Potter Mod. Ling. ii. 39 A phoneme is a closely coherent group or bundle of sounds consisting of one more frequent phone, or chief member, together with other related phones or allophones which take its place in particular contexts.

1991 Trans. Philol. Soc. 89 i. 53 In that event the articulation of final /f/ would have reverted to the voiceless allophone of that phoneme.

1977 Maclean's 28 Nov. 12/2 A whole generation of kids is growing up... They've learned such buzzwords as anglophone, francophone, allophone (people who speak neither French nor English).

1987 Commentary 84 63/2 A quarter of Canada's 24 million people are French-speaking..‘Francophones’... English speakers are ‘Anglophones’, immigrants with other mother-tongues are ‘Allophones’, [etc.].

1996 Gazette (Montreal) (Nexis) 10 Aug. a1 The whole point of sending children to French school, especially allophones who have just arrived in Quebec, is so that they will be fully integrated into francophone society.

2002 Toronto Sun (Nexis) 11 Dec. 4 Heading the burgeoning class of allophones are [the] Chinese, Toronto's largest immigrant group.