by positing three different diaphonemes: A first diaphoneme for words like late , a second diaphoneme for words like wait , and a third diaphoneme for words like eight .

Diaphonology studies the realization of diaphones across dialects, and is important to evaluate if an orthography is adequate for more than one dialect of a language. In historical linguistics, it is concerned with the reflexes of an ancestral phoneme as a language splits into