Phonetic environment

In linguistics, the phonetic environment of any given instance of a phone, a human speech sound, consists of the other phones adjacent to and surrounding it. A speech sound's phonetic environment, sometimes more broadly called its phonological environment, can determine its allophonic or phonemic qualities in a given language.
For example, the English vowel sound, traditionally called the short A, in a word like mat, has the consonant preceding it and the consonant following it, while the vowel itself is word-internal and forms the syllable nucleus. This all describes the phonetic environment of .