What is an allophone?">
You have heard of allophone students, but you don't know what it means? In this article, we’ll give you a definition of the term allophone, which is mostly used in Quebec and in multilingual French-speaking countries.
What does the word allophone mean?
An allophone is a person whose first language is a language other than the official language(s) of the place in which he or she lives. Please note that this term never applies to the indigenous people.
In Canada, an allophone is a person whose first language is not English, French (the country's two official languages) or an indigenous language. According to Statistics Canada, the proportion of allophones in the overall population was 22.3% in 2016. In Quebec, this proportion is 14.5%.
The term "allophone" is initially a quebecism (“un québécisme", i.e., a fact of language specific to Quebec French) but is increasingly used in Belgium, in multilingual French-speaking countries, and in the administration.
What is an allophone student?
In Quebec, it is common to hear about allophone students getting in “classes d’accueil”. In fact, the Charter of the French Language in Quebec requires children to attend school in French. Most immigrant children or children of asylum seekers are therefore integrated into these “welcome classes” in order to promote their integration by learning French.
Due to the current geopolitical situation and the war in Ukraine, since the beginning of 2022, the number of allophone students in Quebec has increased significantly, forcing schools to create new special classes and to reorganize the school staff.
What is an allophone in phonetics?
In sociolinguistics, an allophone is a person whose mother tongue is a foreign language in the community where he or she lives. But in phonetics, this definition changes!
According to Le site de la langue française, an allophone is a "possible sound realization of a phoneme, when the difference in pronunciation, in a given language, does not allow to give a different meaning to the word. In French, the rolled r uvular [ʀ] and the unrolled r [ʁ] are allophones of the same phoneme \ʁ\." Not to be confused with homophones!
This can happen in French, English ("skill" and "kill"), German (kochen "cook", Rauch "smoke"), etc.
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