alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
ic system of
phonetic notation
Phonetic transcription (also known as phonetic script or phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phones'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the I ...
based primarily on the
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern I ...
. It was devised by the
International Phonetic Association
The International Phonetic Association (IPA; French: ', ''API'') is an organization that promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. The IPA's major contribution to phonetics is the Interna ...
in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of
speech sound
In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words.
In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another ...
s in written form.International Phonetic Association (IPA), ''Handbook''. The IPA is used by lexicographers,
foreign language
A foreign language is a language that is not an official language of, nor typically spoken in, a given country, and that native speakers from that country must usually acquire through conscious learning - be this through language lessons at school ...
constructed language
A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction ...
creators, and translators.
The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of
lexical
Lexical may refer to:
Linguistics
* Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language
* Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification
* Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
* Lex ...
(and, to a limited extent,
prosodic
In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, st ...
) sounds in
oral language
A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a si ...
:
phones
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
,
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...
s and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech—such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a
cleft lip and cleft palate
A cleft lip contains an opening in the upper lip that may extend into the nose. The opening may be on one side, both sides, or in the middle. A cleft palate occurs when the palate (the roof of the mouth) contains an opening into the nose. The te ...
—an extended set of symbols may be used.
Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types:
letters
Letter, letters, or literature may refer to:
Characters typeface
* Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet.
* Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...
and
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s. For example, the sound of the
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
letter may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter: , or with a letter plus diacritics: , depending on how precise one wishes to be. Slashes are used to signal
phonemic transcription
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
; therefore, is more abstract than either or and might refer to either, depending on the context and language.The inverted bridge under the specifies it as
apical
Apical means "pertaining to an apex". It may refer to:
*Apical ancestor, refers to the last common ancestor of an entire group, such as a species (biology) or a clan (anthropology)
*Apical (anatomy), an anatomical term of location for features loc ...
(pronounced with the tip of the tongue), and the superscript ''h'' shows that it is aspirated (breathy). Both these qualities cause the English to sound different from the French or Spanish , which is a
laminal
A laminal consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue in contact
with upper lip, teeth, alveolar ridge, to possibly, as ...
(pronounced with the blade of the tongue) and unaspirated . and are thus two different, though similar, sounds.
Occasionally, letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 segmental letters, an indefinitely large number of suprasegmental letters, 44 diacritics (not counting composites), and four extra-lexical
prosodic
In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, st ...
marks in the IPA. Most of these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA.
History
In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist
Paul Passy
Paul Édouard Passy (; 13 January 1859, Versailles21 March 1940, Bourg-la-Reine) was a French linguist, founder of the International Phonetic Association in 1886.
He took part in the elaboration of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Early life ...
, formed what would be known from 1897 onwards as the
International Phonetic Association
The International Phonetic Association (IPA; French: ', ''API'') is an organization that promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. The IPA's major contribution to phonetics is the Interna ...
(in French, ).International Phonetic Association, ''Handbook'', pp. 194–196 Their original alphabet was based on a
spelling reform
A spelling reform is a deliberate, often authoritatively sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the years, many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples a ...
for English known as the
Romic alphabet
The Romic Alphabet, sometimes known as the Romic Reform, is a phonetic alphabet proposed by Henry Sweet. It descends from Ellis's Palaeotype alphabet and English Phonotypic Alphabet, and is the direct ancestor of the International Phonetic Alph ...
, but to make it usable for other languages the values of the symbols were allowed to vary from language to language."Originally, the aim was to make available a set of phonetic symbols which would be given ''different'' articulatory values, if necessary, in different languages." (International Phonetic Association, ''Handbook'', pp. 195–196) For example, the sound (the ''sh'' in ''shoe'') was originally represented with the letter in English, but with the digraph in French. In 1888, the alphabet was revised to be uniform across languages, thus providing the base for all future revisions. The idea of making the IPA was first suggested by
Otto Jespersen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen (; 16 July 1860 – 30 April 1943) was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language. Steven Mithen described him as "one of the greatest language scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth ce ...
Henry Sweet
Henry Sweet (15 September 1845 – 30 April 1912) was an English philologist, phonetician and grammarian.''Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language'', as hosted oencyclopedia.com/ref>
As a philologist, he specialized in the Germanic lang ...
, Daniel Jones, and Passy.
Since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After revisions and expansions from the 1890s to the 1940s, the IPA remained primarily unchanged until the
Kiel Convention
The International Phonetic Alphabet was created soon after the International Phonetic Association was established in the late 19th century. It was intended as an international system of phonetic transcription for oral languages, originally for p ...
in 1989. A minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives.Pullum and Ladusaw, ''
Phonetic Symbol Guide
The ''Phonetic Symbol Guide'' is a book by Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw that explains the histories and uses of the symbols of various phonetic transcription conventions. It was published in 1986, with a second edition in 1996, by the Un ...
'', pp. 152, 209 The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a
labiodental flap
In phonetics, the voiced labiodental flap is a speech sound found primarily in languages of Central Africa, such as Kera and Mangbetu. It has also been reported in the Austronesian language Sika. It is one of the few non- rhotic flaps. The ...
. Apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely of renaming symbols and categories and in modifying
typefaces
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands o ...
.
Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internatio ...
for
speech pathology
Speech is a human vocal communication using language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which hum ...
(extIPA) were created in 1990 and were officially adopted by the
International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association The International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) is an international scholarly association dedicated to the study of speech disorders and language disorders. It was founded in 1991. The Association sponsors a biennial con ...
in 1994.
Description
The general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound ( speech segment)."From its earliest days ..the International Phonetic Association has aimed to provide 'a separate sign for each distinctive sound; that is, for each sound which, being used instead of another, in the same language, can change the meaning of a word'." (International Phonetic Association, ''Handbook'', p. 27) This means that:
* It does not normally use combinations of letters to represent single sounds, the way English does with , and , or single letters to represent multiple sounds, the way represents or in English.
* There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, the way and in several European languages have a "hard" or "soft" pronunciation.
* The IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as "selectiveness".
For instance, flaps and taps are two different kinds of articulation, but since no language has (yet) been found to make a distinction between, say, an
alveolar flap
The voiced alveolar tap or flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents a dental, alveolar, or postalveolar tap or flap is .
The terms ''tap'' and ''flap' ...
and an alveolar tap, the IPA does not provide such sounds with dedicated letters. Instead, it provides a single letter (in this case, ) for both. Strictly speaking, this makes the IPA a partially phon''em''ic alphabet, not a purely phon''et''ic one. However, if a large number of phonemically distinct letters can be derived with a diacritic, that may be used instead.This exception to the rules was made primarily to explain why the IPA does not make a dental–alveolar distinction, despite one being phonemic in hundreds of languages, including most of the continent of Australia.
Americanist Phonetic Notation
Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American ...
makes (or at least made) a distinction between apical and laminal , which is easily applicable to alveolar vs dental (when a language distinguishes apical alveolar from laminal dental, as in Australia), but despite several proposals to the Council, the IPA never voted to accept such a distinction.
The alphabet is designed for transcribing sounds (phones), not
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
s, though it is used for phonemic transcription as well. A few letters that did not indicate specific sounds have been retired (, once used for the "compound" tone of Swedish and Norwegian, and , once used for the
moraic
A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a basic timing (linguistics), timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ''ba'' consists of one m ...
nasal of Japanese), though one remains: , used for the
sj-sound
The ''sj''-sound ( sv, sj-ljudet ) is a voiceless fricative phoneme found in most dialects of the sound system of Swedish. It has a variety of realisations, whose precise phonetic characterisation is a matter of debate, but which usually featur ...
of Swedish. When the IPA is used for phonemic transcription, the letter–sound correspondence can be rather loose. For example, and are used in the IPA ''Handbook'' for and .
Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 letters represent
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...
s and
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
s, 31
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s are used to modify these, and 17 additional signs indicate
suprasegmental
In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, str ...
stress
Stress may refer to:
Science and medicine
* Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition
* Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
, and intonation.
There are three basic tone diacritics and five basic tone letters, both sets of which may be compounded.
These are organized into a chart; the chart displayed here is the official chart as posted at the website of the IPA.
Letter forms
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
.
"The non-roman letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet have been designed as far as possible to harmonize well with the roman letters. The Association does not recognize makeshift letters; It recognizes only letters which have been carefully cut so as to be in harmony with the other letters." (IPA 1949)
For this reason, most letters are either
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
or
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, , originally had the form of a dotless
question mark
The question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause or phrase in many languages.
History
In the fifth century, Syriac Bible manuscripts used que ...
, and derives from an apostrophe. A few letters, such as that of the voiced
pharyngeal fricative
A pharyngeal consonant is a consonant that is articulated primarily in the pharynx. Some phoneticians distinguish upper pharyngeal consonants, or "high" pharyngeals, pronounced by retracting the root of the tongue in the mid to upper pharynx, ...
, , were inspired by other writing systems (in this case, the
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
letter ⟨⟩, ', via the reversed apostrophe).
Some letter forms derive from existing letters:
# The right-swinging tail, as in , indicates
retroflex
A retroflex (Help:IPA/English, /ˈɹɛtʃɹoːflɛks/), apico-domal (Help:IPA/English, /əpɪkoːˈdɔmɪnəl/), or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated betw ...
articulation. It originates from the hook of an ''r''.
# The top hook, as in , indicates implosion.
# Several
nasal consonants
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majorit ...
are based on the form : . and derive from ligatures of ''gn'' and ''ng,'' and is an ''ad hoc'' imitation of .
# Letters turned 180 degrees for suggestive shapes, such as from .Originally, was written as a small capital U. However, this was not easy to read, and so it was replaced with a turned small capital omega. In modern typefaces, it often has its own design, called a 'horseshoe'. Either the original letter may be reminiscent of the target sound (e.g., ) or the turned one (e.g., ). Rotation was popular in the era of mechanical typesetting, as it had the advantage of not requiring the casting of special type for IPA symbols, much as the sorts had traditionally often pulled double duty for and , and , and , and to reduce cost.
#:
# Among consonant letters, the
small capital
In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is techni ...
guttural
Guttural speech sounds are those with a primary place of articulation near the back of the oral cavity, especially where it's difficult to distinguish a sound's place of articulation and its phonation. In popular usage it is an imprecise term fo ...
sounds than their base letters. ( is a late exception.) Among vowel letters, small capitals indicate "lax" vowels. Most of the original small-cap vowel letters have been modified into more distinctive shapes (e.g. from ), with only remaining as small capitals.
Typography and iconicity
The International Phonetic Alphabet is based on the
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern I ...
, and uses as few non-Latin letters as possible. The Association created the IPA so that the sound values of most letters would correspond to "international usage" (approximately
Classical Latin
Classical Latin is the form of Literary Latin recognized as a literary standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. It was used from 75 BC to the 3rd century AD, when it developed into Late Latin. In some later period ...
). Hence, the consonant letters , , , (
hard
Hard may refer to:
* Hardness, resistance of physical materials to deformation or fracture
* Hard water, water with high mineral content
Arts and entertainment
* ''Hard'' (TV series), a French TV series
* Hard (band), a Hungarian hard rock supe ...
) , (non-silent) , (unaspirated) , , , , (unaspirated) , (voiceless) , (unaspirated) , , , and have more or less the values found in English; and the vowel letters , , , , correspond to the (long) sound values of Latin: is like the vowel in ''machne'', is as in ''rle'', etc. Other Latin letters, particularly , and , differ from English, but have their IPA values in Latin or other European languages.
This basic Latin inventory was extended by adding small-capital and cursive forms, diacritics and rotation. The sound values of these letters are related to those of the original letters, and their derivation may be iconic. For example, letters with a rightward-facing hook at the bottom represent
retroflex
A retroflex (Help:IPA/English, /ˈɹɛtʃɹoːflɛks/), apico-domal (Help:IPA/English, /əpɪkoːˈdɔmɪnəl/), or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated betw ...
equivalents of the source letters, and small capital letters usually represent
uvular
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not prov ...
equivalents of their source letters.
There are also several letters from the Greek alphabet, though their sound values may differ from Greek. The most extreme difference is , which is a vowel in Greek but a consonant in the IPA. For most Greek letters, subtly different glyph shapes have been devised for the IPA, specifically , , , , , and , which are encoded in
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
separately from their parent Greek letters. One, however – – has only its Greek form, while for and , both Greek and Latin forms are in common use.
The tone letters are not derived from an alphabet, but from a
pitch trace
Pitch may refer to:
Acoustic frequency
* Pitch (music), the perceived frequency of sound including "definite pitch" and "indefinite pitch"
** Absolute pitch or "perfect pitch"
** Pitch class, a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octav ...
on a
musical scale
In music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, and a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale.
Often, especially in the ...
.
Beyond the letters themselves, there are a variety of secondary symbols which aid in transcription.
Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
marks can be combined with IPA letters to add phonetic detail such as tone and secondary articulations. There are also special symbols for prosodic features such as stress and intonation.
Brackets and transcription delimiters
There are two principal types of brackets used to set off (delimit) IPA transcriptions:
Other conventions are less commonly seen:
All three of the above are provided by the IPA ''Handbook''. The following are not, but may be seen in IPA transcription or in associated material (especially angle brackets):
Some examples of contrasting brackets in the literature:
Cursive forms
IPA letters have cursive forms designed for use in manuscripts and when taking field notes, but the 1999 ''Handbook of the International Phonetic Association'' recommended against their use, as cursive IPA is "harder for most people to decipher."
Braille representation
Several
Braille
Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are blind, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille disp ...
adaptations of the IPA have seen use, the most recent published in 2008 and widely accepted since 2011. It does not have complete support for tone.
Modifying the IPA chart
The International Phonetic Alphabet is occasionally modified by the Association. After each modification, the Association provides an updated simplified presentation of the alphabet in the form of a chart. (See
History of the IPA
The International Phonetic Alphabet was created soon after the International Phonetic Association was established in the late 19th century. It was intended as an international system of phonetic transcription for oral languages, originally for ...
.) Not all aspects of the alphabet can be accommodated in a chart of the size published by the IPA. The
alveolo-palatal
In phonetics, alveolo-palatal (or alveopalatal) consonants, sometimes synonymous with pre-palatal consonants, are intermediate in articulation between the coronal and dorsal consonants, or which have simultaneous alveolar and palatal artic ...
and epiglottal consonants, for example, are not included in the consonant chart for reasons of space rather than of theory (two additional columns would be required, one between the retroflex and palatal columns and the other between the pharyngeal and glottal columns), and the
lateral flap A lateral flap is a family of consonantal sounds, used in some spoken languages.
There are four attested or claimed lateral flaps in the world's languages:
* The alveolar lateral flap is quite common.
*A retroflex lateral flap () is found throu ...
would require an additional row for that single consonant, so they are listed instead under the catchall block of "other symbols". The indefinitely large number of tone letters would make a full accounting impractical even on a larger page, and only a few examples are shown, and even the tone diacritics are not complete; the reversed tone letters are not illustrated at all.
The procedure for modifying the alphabet or the chart is to propose the change in the '' Journal of the IPA.'' (See, for example, August 2008 on an
open central unrounded vowel
The open central unrounded vowel, or low central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in many spoken languages. While the International Phonetic Alphabet officially has no dedicated letter for this sound between front and back , it ...
and August 2011 on central approximants.) Reactions to the proposal may be published in the same or subsequent issues of the Journal (as in August 2009 on the open central vowel). A formal proposal is then put to the Council of the IPA – which is elected by the membership – for further discussion and a formal vote.
Nonetheless, many users of the alphabet, including the leadership of the Association itself, deviate from this norm.See "Illustrations of the IPA" in the ''IPA Handbook'' (1999) for individual languages which for example may use as a phonemic symbol for what is phonetically realized as , or superscript variants of IPA letters that are not officially defined.
The ''Journal of the IPA'' finds it acceptable to mix IPA and extIPA symbols in consonant charts in their articles. (For instance, including the extIPA letter , rather than , in an illustration of the IPA.)
Usage
Of more than 160 IPA symbols, relatively few will be used to transcribe speech in any one language, with various levels of precision. A precise phonetic transcription, in which sounds are specified in detail, is known as a ''narrow transcription''. A coarser transcription with less detail is called a ''broad transcription.'' Both are relative terms, and both are generally enclosed in square brackets. Broad phonetic transcriptions may restrict themselves to easily heard details, or only to details that are relevant to the discussion at hand, and may differ little if at all from phonemic transcriptions, but they make no theoretical claim that all the distinctions transcribed are necessarily meaningful in the language.
For example, the English word ''little'' may be transcribed broadly as , approximately describing many pronunciations. A narrower transcription may focus on individual or dialectical details: in
General American
General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans. In the United States it is often perceived as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or so ...
, in
Cockney
Cockney is an accent and dialect of English, mainly spoken in London and its environs, particularly by working-class and lower middle-class Londoners. The term "Cockney" has traditionally been used to describe a person from the East End, or ...
, or in Southern US English.
Phonemic transcriptions, which express the conceptual counterparts of spoken sounds, are usually enclosed in slashes (/ /) and tend to use simpler letters with few diacritics. The choice of IPA letters may reflect theoretical claims of how speakers conceptualize sounds as phonemes or they may be merely a convenience for typesetting. Phonemic approximations between slashes do not have absolute sound values. For instance, in English, either the vowel of ''pick'' or the vowel of ''peak'' may be transcribed as , so that ''pick'', ''peak'' would be transcribed as or as ; and neither is identical to the vowel of the French ' which would also be transcribed . By contrast, a narrow phonetic transcription of ''pick'', ''peak'', ''pique'' could be: , , .
Linguists
IPA is popular for transcription by linguists. Some American linguists, however, use a mix of IPA with
Americanist phonetic notation
Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American ...
or use some nonstandard symbols for various reasons. Authors who employ such nonstandard use are encouraged to include a chart or other explanation of their choices, which is good practice in general, as linguists differ in their understanding of the exact meaning of IPA symbols and common conventions change over time.
Dictionaries
English
Many British dictionaries, including the
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a co ...
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
The ''Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary'' (''OALD'') was the first advanced learner's dictionary of English. It was first published in 1948. It is the largest English-language dictionary from Oxford University Press aimed at a non-native au ...
'' and the ''
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
The ''Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary'' (abbreviated ''CALD'') was first published in 1995 under the name ''Cambridge International Dictionary of English'', by the Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the ...
'', now use the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the pronunciation of words. However, most American (and some British) volumes use one of a variety of
pronunciation respelling
A pronunciation respelling is a regular phonetic respelling of a word that has a standard spelling but whose pronunciation according to that spelling may be ambiguous, which is used to indicate the pronunciation of that word. Pronunciation respe ...
systems, intended to be more comfortable for readers of English and to be more acceptable across dialects, without the implication of a preferred pronunciation that the IPA might convey. For example, the respelling systems in many American dictionaries (such as '' Merriam-Webster'') use for IPA and for IPA , reflecting the usual spelling of those sounds in English.
(In IPA, represents the sound of the French , as in ', and represents the sequence of consonants in ''graopper''.)
Other languages
The IPA is also not universal among dictionaries in languages other than English. Monolingual dictionaries of languages with
phonemic orthographies
A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographi ...
generally do not bother with indicating the pronunciation of most words, and tend to use respelling systems for words with unexpected pronunciations. Dictionaries produced in Israel use the IPA rarely and sometimes use the
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet ( he, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewi ...
for transcription of foreign words.Monolingual Hebrew dictionaries use pronunciation respelling for words with unusual spelling; for example, the ''
Even-Shoshan Dictionary
The Hebrew dictionary by Avraham Even-Shoshan, commonly known as the ''Even-Shoshan Dictionary'', was first published (1948–1952) as " (''milon ḥadash'', ''A New Dictionary''), later (1966–1970) as (''hamilon heḥadash'', ''The New Dictio ...
'' respells as because the word uses the '' kamatz katan''. Bilingual dictionaries that translate from foreign languages into Russian usually employ the IPA, but monolingual Russian dictionaries occasionally use pronunciation respelling for foreign words.For example,
Sergey Ozhegov
Sergey Ivanovich Ozhegov (russian: Серге́й Ива́нович О́жегов; 22 September 1900 – 15 December 1964) was a Russian lexicographer who in 1926 graduated from the Leningrad University where his teachers included ...
's dictionary adds э́in brackets to the French loan-word ''пенсне'' (') to indicate that the final does not iotate the preceding .
The IPA is more common in bilingual dictionaries, but there are exceptions here too. Mass-market bilingual Czech dictionaries, for instance, tend to use the IPA only for sounds not found in
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
* Czech, ...
.
Standard orthographies and case variants
IPA letters have been incorporated into the alphabets of various languages, notably via the
Africa Alphabet
The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) was developed by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in 1928, with the help of some Africans led by Diedrich Hermann Westermann, who served as d ...
in many sub-Saharan languages such as
Hausa
Hausa may refer to:
* Hausa people, an ethnic group of West Africa
* Hausa language, spoken in West Africa
* Hausa Kingdoms, a historical collection of Hausa city-states
* Hausa (horse) or Dongola horse, an African breed of riding horse
See also
...
,
Fula
Fula may refer to:
*Fula people (or Fulani, Fulɓe)
*Fula language (or Pulaar, Fulfulde, Fulani)
**The Fula variety known as the Pulaar language
**The Fula variety known as the Pular language
**The Fula variety known as Maasina Fulfulde
*Al-Fula ...
,
Akan Akan may refer to:
People and languages
*Akan people, an ethnic group in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire
*Akan language, a language spoken by the Akan people
*Kwa languages, a language group which includes Akan
* Central Tano languages, a language group ...
,
Gbe languages
The Gbe languages (pronounced ) form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widel ...
,
Manding languages
The Manding languages (sometimes spelt Manden) are a dialect continuum within the Mande language family spoken in West Africa. Varieties of Manding are generally considered (among native speakers) to be mutually intelligible – dependent on exp ...
,
Lingala
Lingala (Ngala) (Lingala: ''Lingála'') is a Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser degree in ...
, etc. Capital case variants have been created for use in these languages. For example, Kabiyè of northern
Togo
Togo (), officially the Togolese Republic (french: République togolaise), is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, where its c ...
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
, but appear in Latin ranges other than the
IPA extensions
IPA Extensions is a block (U+0250–U+02AF) of the Unicode standard that contains full size letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Both modern and historical characters are included, as well as former and proposed IPA signs ...
.
In the IPA itself, however, only lower-case letters are used. The 1949 edition of the IPA handbook indicated that an asterisk might be prefixed to indicate that a word was a proper name, but this convention was not included in the 1999 ''Handbook'', which notes the contrary use of the asterisk as a placeholder for a sound or feature that does not have a symbol.
Classical singing
The IPA has widespread use among classical singers during preparation as they are frequently required to sing in a variety of foreign languages. They are also taught by vocal coaches to perfect diction and improve tone quality and tuning. Opera librettos are authoritatively transcribed in IPA, such as
Nico Castel
Nico Castel (August 1, 1931 – May 31, 2015), born Naftali Chaim Castel Kalinhoff, was a comprimario tenor and well-known language and diction coach, as well as a prolific translator of libretti and writer of books on singing diction. Although Cas ...
's volumes and Timothy Cheek's book ''Singing in Czech''. Opera singers' ability to read IPA was used by the site ''Visual Thesaurus'', which employed several opera singers "to make recordings for the 150,000 words and phrases in VT's lexical database ... for their vocal stamina, attention to the details of enunciation, and most of all, knowledge of IPA".
Letters
The International Phonetic Association organizes the letters of the IPA into three categories:
pulmonic
In phonetics, the airstream mechanism is the method by which airflow is created in the vocal tract. Along with phonation and articulation, it is one of three main components of speech production. The airstream mechanism is mandatory for sound p ...
consonants, non-pulmonic consonants, and vowels.
Pulmonic consonant letters are arranged singly or in pairs of voiceless ( tenuis) and voiced sounds, with these then grouped in columns from front (labial) sounds on the left to back (glottal) sounds on the right. In official publications by the IPA, two columns are omitted to save space, with the letters listed among 'other symbols' even though theoretically they belong in the main chart,They were moved "for presentational convenience ..because of heirrarity and the small number of types of sounds which are found there." (IPA ''Handbook'', p 18) and with the remaining consonants arranged in rows from full closure (occlusives: stops and nasals), to brief closure (vibrants: trills and taps), to partial closure (fricatives) and minimal closure (approximants), again with a row left out to save space. In the table below, a slightly different arrangement is made: All pulmonic consonants are included in the pulmonic-consonant table, and the vibrants and laterals are separated out so that the rows reflect the common
lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a pa ...
pathway of ''stop → fricative → approximant,'' as well as the fact that several letters pull double duty as both fricative and approximant; affricates may be created by joining stops and fricatives from adjacent cells. Shaded cells represent articulations that are judged to be impossible.
Vowel letters are also grouped in pairs—of unrounded and rounded vowel sounds—with these pairs also arranged from front on the left to back on the right, and from maximal closure at top to minimal closure at bottom. No vowel letters are omitted from the chart, though in the past some of the mid central vowels were listed among the 'other symbols'.
Consonants
Pulmonic consonants
A
pulmonic
In phonetics, the airstream mechanism is the method by which airflow is created in the vocal tract. Along with phonation and articulation, it is one of three main components of speech production. The airstream mechanism is mandatory for sound p ...
consonant is a consonant made by obstructing the glottis (the space between the vocal cords) or
oral cavity
In animal anatomy, the mouth, also known as the oral cavity, or in Latin cavum oris, is the opening through which many animals take in food and issue vocal sounds. It is also the cavity lying at the upper end of the alimentary canal, bounded on t ...
(the mouth) and either simultaneously or subsequently letting out air from the lungs. Pulmonic consonants make up the majority of consonants in the IPA, as well as in human language. All consonants in English fall into this category.
The pulmonic consonant table, which includes most consonants, is arranged in rows that designate manner of articulation, meaning how the consonant is produced, and columns that designate
place of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articula ...
, meaning where in the vocal tract the consonant is produced. The main chart includes only consonants with a single place of articulation.
Notes
* In rows where some letters appear in pairs (the '' obstruents''), the letter to the right represents a
voiced consonant
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to ref ...
(except breathy-voiced ). In the other rows (the '' sonorants''), the single letter represents a voiced consonant.
* While IPA provides a single letter for the coronal places of articulation (for all consonants but fricatives), these do not always have to be used exactly. When dealing with a particular language, the letters may be treated as specifically dental, alveolar, or post-alveolar, as appropriate for that language, without diacritics.
* Shaded areas indicate articulations judged to be impossible.
* The letters are canonically voiced fricatives but may be used for approximants.
* In many languages, such as English, and are not actually glottal, fricatives, or approximants. Rather, they are bare phonation.
* It is primarily the shape of the tongue rather than its position that distinguishes the fricatives , , and .
* are defined as epiglottal fricatives under the "Other symbols" section in the official IPA chart, but they may be treated as trills at the same place of articulation as because trilling of the
aryepiglottic fold
The aryepiglottic folds are triangular folds of mucous membrane of the larynx. They enclose ligamentous and muscular fibres. They extend from the lateral borders of the epiglottis to the arytenoid cartilages, hence the name 'aryepiglottic'. They ...
s typically co-occurs.
* Some listed phones are not known to exist as
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
s in any language.
Non-pulmonic consonants
Non-pulmonic consonants are sounds whose airflow is not dependent on the lungs. These include clicks (found in the
Khoisan languages
The Khoisan languages (; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of ...
implosives
Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism.''Phonetics for communication disorders.'' Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller. Ro ...
Hausa
Hausa may refer to:
* Hausa people, an ethnic group of West Africa
* Hausa language, spoken in West Africa
* Hausa Kingdoms, a historical collection of Hausa city-states
* Hausa (horse) or Dongola horse, an African breed of riding horse
See also
...
Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
), and
ejectives
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...
(found in many
Amerindian
The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples.
Many Indigenous peoples of the A ...
and
Caucasian languages
The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
Linguistic comparison allows t ...
).
Notes
* Clicks have traditionally been described as consisting of a forward place of articulation, commonly called the click 'type' or historically the 'influx', and a rear place of articulation, which when combined with the voicing, aspiration, nasalization, affrication, ejection, timing etc. of the click is commonly called the click 'accompaniment' or historically the 'efflux'. The IPA click letters indicate only the click type (forward articulation and release). Therefore, all clicks require two letters for proper notation: ''etc.'', or with the order reversed if both the forward and rear releases are audible. The letter for the rear articulation is frequently omitted, in which case a may usually be assumed. However, some researchers dispute the idea that clicks should be analyzed as doubly articulated, as the traditional transcription implies, and analyze the rear occlusion as solely a part of the airstream mechanism. In transcriptions of such approaches, the click letter represents both places of articulation, with the different letters representing the different click types, and diacritics are used for the elements of the accompaniment: ''etc.''
* Letters for the
voiceless
In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies ...
implosives are no longer supported by the IPA, though they remain in Unicode. Instead, the IPA typically uses the voiced equivalent with a voiceless diacritic: , ''etc.''.
* The letter for the
retroflex implosive
The voiced retroflex implosive is a type of consonantal sound. It is not known to be phonemically distinct from alveolar in any language. Sindhi has an implosive that varies between dental and retroflex articulation, while Oromo, Saraiki and ...
, , is not "explicitly IPA approved" (''Handbook'', p. 166), but has the expected form if such a symbol were to be approved.
* The ejective diacritic is placed at the right-hand margin of the consonant, rather than immediately after the letter for the stop: , . In imprecise transcription, it often stands in for a superscript glottal stop in
glottalized
Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consona ...
but pulmonic sonorants, such as , , , (also transcribable as creaky , , , ).
Affricates
Affricates
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair ...
and co-articulated stops are represented by two letters joined by a tie bar, either above or below the letters with no difference in meaning.It is traditional to place the tie bar above the letters. It may be placed below to avoid overlap with ascenders or diacritic marks, or simply because it is more legible that way, as in Affricates are optionally represented by ligatures (e.g. ), though this is no longer official IPA usage because a great number of ligatures would be required to represent all affricates this way. Alternatively, a superscript notation for a consonant release is sometimes used to transcribe affricates, for example for , paralleling ~ . The letters for the palatal plosives and are often used as a convenience for and or similar affricates, even in official IPA publications, so they must be interpreted with care.
Co-articulated consonants
Co-articulated consonant
Co-articulated consonants or complex consonants are consonants produced with two simultaneous places of articulation. They may be divided into two classes: doubly articulated consonants with two primary places of articulation of the same manner ...
s are sounds that involve two simultaneous
places of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articula ...
(are pronounced using two parts of the
vocal tract
The vocal tract is the cavity in human bodies and in animals where the sound produced at the sound source ( larynx in mammals; syrinx in birds) is filtered.
In birds it consists of the trachea, the syrinx, the oral cavity, the upper part of th ...
). In English, the in "went" is a coarticulated consonant, being pronounced by rounding the lips and raising the back of the tongue. Similar sounds are and . In some languages, plosives can be double-articulated, for example in the name of
.
Notes
* , the Swedish ''sj''-sound, is described by the IPA as a "simultaneous and ", but it is unlikely such a simultaneous fricative actually exists in any language.
* Multiple tie bars can be used: or . For instance, if a prenasalized stop is transcribed , and a doubly articulated stop , then a prenasalized doubly articulated stop would be
* If a diacritic needs to be placed on or under a tie bar, the
combining grapheme joiner
The combining grapheme joiner (CGJ), is a Unicode character that has no visible glyph and is "default ignorable" by applications. Its name is a misnomer and does not describe its function: the character does not join graphemes. Its purpose is to s ...
(U+034F) needs to be used, as in 'chewed' ( Margi). Font support is spotty, however.
Vowels
The IPA defines a vowel as a sound which occurs at a syllable center. Below is a chart depicting the vowels of the IPA. The IPA maps the vowels according to the position of the tongue.
The vertical axis of the chart is mapped by
vowel height
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (le ...
. Vowels pronounced with the tongue lowered are at the bottom, and vowels pronounced with the tongue raised are at the top. For example, (the first vowel in ''father'') is at the bottom because the tongue is lowered in this position. (the vowel in "meet") is at the top because the sound is said with the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth.
In a similar fashion, the horizontal axis of the chart is determined by
vowel backness
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
. Vowels with the tongue moved towards the front of the mouth (such as , the vowel in "met") are to the left in the chart, while those in which it is moved to the back (such as , the vowel in "but") are placed to the right in the chart.
In places where vowels are paired, the right represents a rounded vowel (in which the lips are rounded) while the left is its unrounded counterpart.
Diphthongs
Diphthongs are typically specified with a non-syllabic diacritic, as in or , or with a superscript for the on- or off-glide, as in or . Sometimes a tie bar is used: , especially if it is difficult to tell if the diphthong is characterized by an on-glide, an off-glide or is variable.
Notes
* officially represents a front vowel, but there is little if any distinction between front and central open vowels (see ), and is frequently used for an open central vowel. If disambiguation is required, the retraction diacritic or the centralized diacritic may be added to indicate an open central vowel, as in or .
Diacritics and prosodic notation
Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s are used for phonetic detail. They are added to IPA letters to indicate a modification or specification of that letter's normal pronunciation.International Phonetic Association, ''Handbook'', pp. 14–15.
By being made superscript, any IPA letter may function as a diacritic, conferring elements of its articulation to the base letter. Those superscript letters listed below are specifically provided for by the IPA ''Handbook''; other uses can be illustrated with ( with fricative release), ( with affricate onset), (prenasalized ), ( with breathy voice), (glottalized ), ( with a flavor of , i.e. a
voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant
The voiceless alveolar fricatives are a type of fricative consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (gum line) just behind the teeth. This refers to a class of sounds, not a single sound. There are at leas ...
), ( with
diphthongization
In historical linguistics, vowel breaking, vowel fracture, or diphthongization is the sound change of a monophthong into a diphthong or triphthong.
Types
Vowel breaking may be unconditioned or conditioned. It may be triggered by the presence of ...
), ( compressed ). Superscript diacritics placed after a letter are ambiguous between simultaneous modification of the sound and phonetic detail at the end of the sound. For example, labialized may mean either simultaneous and or else with a labialized release. Superscript diacritics placed before a letter, on the other hand, normally indicate a modification of the onset of the sound ( glottalized , with a glottal onset). (See .)
Notes
: With aspirated voiced consonants, the aspiration is usually also voiced (voiced aspirated – but see voiced consonants with voiceless aspiration). Many linguists prefer one of the diacritics dedicated to breathy voice over simple aspiration, such as . Some linguists restrict that diacritic to sonorants, such as breathy-voice , and transcribe voiced-aspirated obstruents as e.g. .
: Care must be taken that a superscript retraction sign is not mistaken for mid tone.
: These are relative to the cardinal value of the letter. They can also apply to unrounded vowels: is more spread (less rounded) than cardinal , and is less spread than cardinal . Since can mean that the is labialized (rounded) throughout its articulation, and makes no sense ( is already completely unrounded), can only mean a less-labialized/rounded . However, readers might mistake for "" with a labialized off-glide, or might wonder if the two diacritics cancel each other out. Placing the 'less rounded' diacritic under the labialization diacritic, , makes it clear that it is the labialization that is 'less rounded' than its cardinal IPA value.
Subdiacritics (diacritics normally placed below a letter) may be moved above a letter to avoid conflict with a
descender
In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font.
For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the ''v'' c ...
, as in voiceless . The raising and lowering diacritics have optional spacing forms , that avoid descenders.
The state of the glottis can be finely transcribed with diacritics. A series of alveolar plosives ranging from open-glottis to closed-glottis phonation is:
Additional diacritics are provided by the
Extensions to the IPA
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internati ...
for speech pathology.
Suprasegmentals
These symbols describe the features of a language above the level of individual consonants and vowels, that is, at the level of syllable, word or
phrase
In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...
stress
Stress may refer to:
Science and medicine
* Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition
* Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
, intensity, tone and gemination of the sounds of a language, as well as the
rhythm
Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular re ...
and intonation of speech.International Phonetic Association, ''Handbook'', p. 13. Various ligatures of pitch/tone letters and diacritics are provided for by the Kiel convention and used in the IPA ''Handbook'' despite not being found in the summary of the IPA alphabet found on the one-page chart.
Under capital letters below we will see how a carrier letter may be used to indicate suprasegmental features such as labialization or nasalization. Some authors omit the carrier letter, for e.g. suffixed or prefixed , or place a spacing variant of a diacritic such as or at the beginning or end of a word to indicate that it applies to the entire word.
The old staveless tone letters, which are effectively obsolete, include high , mid , low , rising and falling .
Stress
Officially, the stress marks appear before the stressed syllable, and thus mark the syllable boundary as well as stress (though the syllable boundary may still be explicitly marked with a period). Occasionally the stress mark is placed immediately before the nucleus of the syllable, after any consonantal onset. In such transcriptions, the stress mark does not mark a syllable boundary. The primary stress mark may be doubled for extra stress (such as prosodic stress). The secondary stress mark is sometimes seen doubled for extra-weak stress, but this convention has not been adopted by the IPA. Some dictionaries place both stress marks before a syllable, , to indicate that pronunciations with either primary or secondary stress are heard, though this is not IPA usage.
Boundary markers
There are three boundary markers: for a syllable break, for a minor prosodic break and for a major prosodic break. The tags 'minor' and 'major' are intentionally ambiguous. Depending on need, 'minor' may vary from a foot break to a break in list-intonation to a continuing–prosodic unit boundary (equivalent to a comma), and while 'major' is often any intonation break, it may be restricted to a final–prosodic unit boundary (equivalent to a period). The 'major' symbol may also be doubled, , for a stronger break.
Although not part of the IPA, the following additional boundary markers are often used in conjunction with the IPA: for a
mora
Mora may refer to:
People
* Mora (surname)
Places Sweden
* Mora, Säter, Sweden
* Mora, Sweden, the seat of Mora Municipality
* Mora Municipality, Sweden
United States
* Mora, Louisiana, an unincorporated community
* Mora, Minnesota, a city
* M ...
or mora boundary, for a syllable or syllable boundary, for a morpheme boundary, for a word boundary (may be doubled, , for e.g. a breath-group boundary), for a phrase or intermediate boundary and for a prosodic boundary. For example, C# is a word-final consonant, %V a post- pausa vowel, and T% an IU-final tone (edge tone).
Pitch and tone
are defined in the ''Handbook'' as "upstep" and "downstep", concepts from tonal languages. However, the upstep symbol can also be used for
pitch reset
In speech, phonetic
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of sp ...
, and the IPA ''Handbook'' uses it for prosody in the illustration for Portuguese, a non-tonal language.
Phonetic pitch and phonemic tone may be indicated by either diacritics placed over the nucleus of the syllable (e.g., high-pitch ) or by Chao tone letters placed either before or after the word or syllable. There are three graphic variants of the tone letters: with or without a stave, and facing left or facing right from the stave. The stave was introduced with the 1989 Kiel Convention, as was the option of placing a staved letter after the word or syllable, while retaining the older conventions. There are therefore six ways to transcribe pitch/tone in the IPA: i.e., , , , , and for a high pitch/tone. Of the tone letters, only left-facing staved letters and a few representative combinations are shown in the summary on the ''Chart'', and in practice it is currently more common for tone letters to occur after the syllable/word than before, as in the Chao tradition. Placement before the word is a carry-over from the pre-Kiel IPA convention, as is still the case for the stress and upstep/downstep marks. The IPA endorses the Chao tradition of using the left-facing tone letters, , for underlying tone, and the right-facing letters, , for surface tone, as occurs in
tone sandhi
Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes.
It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...
, and for the intonation of non-tonal languages.Maddieson and others have noted that a phonemic/phonetic distinction should be handled by /slash/ or racketdelimiters. However, the reversed tone letters remain in use for tone sandhi. In the Portuguese illustration in the 1999 ''Handbook'', tone letters are placed before a word or syllable to indicate prosodic pitch (equivalent to global rise and global fall, but allowing more precision), and in the Cantonese illustration they are placed after a word/syllable to indicate lexical tone. Theoretically therefore prosodic pitch and lexical tone could be simultaneously transcribed in a single text, though this is not a formalized distinction.
Rising and falling pitch, as in
contour tone
A tone contour, or contour tone, is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoi ...
s, are indicated by combining the pitch diacritics and letters in the table, such as grave plus acute for rising and acute plus grave for falling . Only six combinations of two diacritics are supported, and only across three levels (high, mid, low), despite the diacritics supporting five levels of pitch in isolation. The four other explicitly approved rising and falling diacritic combinations are high/mid rising , low rising , high falling , and low/mid falling .A work-around sometimes seen when a language has more than one rising or falling tone, and the author wishes to avoid the poorly legible diacritics but does not wish to employ tone letters, is to restrict the generic rising and falling diacritics to the higher-pitched of the rising and falling tones, say and , and to resurrect the retired (pre-Kiel) IPA subscript diacritics and for the lower-pitched rising and falling tones, say and . When a language has either four or six level tones, the two middle tones are sometimes transcribed as high-mid (non-standard) and low-mid . Non-standard is occasionally seen combined with acute and grave diacritcs or with the macron to distinguish contour tones that involve the higher of the two mid tone levels.
The Chao tone letters, on the other hand, may be combined in any pattern, and are therefore used for more complex contours and finer distinctions than the diacritics allow, such as mid-rising , extra-high falling , etc. There are 20 such possibilities. However, in Chao's original proposal, which was adopted by the IPA in 1989, he stipulated that the half-high and half-low letters may be combined with each other, but not with the other three tone letters, so as not to create spuriously precise distinctions. With this restriction, there are 8 possibilities.
The old staveless tone letters tend to be more restricted than the staved letters, though not as restricted as the diacritics. Officially, they support as many distinctions as the staved letters, but typically only three pitch levels are distinguished. Unicode supports default or high-pitch and low-pitch . Only a few mid-pitch tones are supported (such as ), and then only accidentally.
Although tone diacritics and tone letters are presented as equivalent on the chart, "this was done only to simplify the layout of the chart. The two sets of symbols are not comparable in this way." Using diacritics, a high tone is and a low tone is ; in tone letters, these are and . One can double the diacritics for extra-high and extra-low ; there is no parallel to this using tone letters. Instead, tone letters have mid-high and mid-low ; again, there is no equivalent among the diacritics.
The correspondence breaks down even further once they start combining. For more complex tones, one may combine three or four tone diacritics in any permutation,P.J. Roach, Report on the 1989 Kiel Convention, ''Journal of the International Phonetic Association'', Vol. 19, No. 2 (December 1989), p. 75–76 though in practice only generic peaking (rising-falling) and dipping (falling-rising) combinations are used. Chao tone letters are required for finer detail (, etc.). Although only 10 peaking and dipping tones were proposed in Chao's original, limited set of tone letters, phoneticians often make finer distinctions, and indeed an example is found on the IPA Chart.The example has changed over the years. In the chart included in the 1999 IPA ''Handbook'', it was , and since the 2018 revision of the chart it has been . The system allows the transcription of 112 peaking and dipping pitch contours, including tones that are level for part of their length.
More complex contours are possible. Chao gave an example of (mid-high-low-mid) from English prosody.
Chao tone letters generally appear after each syllable, for a language with syllable tone (), or after the phonological word, for a language with
word tone
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
(). The IPA gives the option of placing the tone letters before the word or syllable (, ), but this is rare for lexical tone. (And indeed reversed tone letters may be used to clarify that they apply to the following rather than to the preceding syllable: , .) The staveless letters are not directly supported by Unicode, but some fonts allow the stave in Chao tone letters to be suppressed.
Comparative degree
IPA diacritics may be doubled to indicate an extra degree of the feature indicated.Kelly & Local (1989) ''Doing Phonology'', Manchester University Press. This is a productive process, but apart from extra-high and extra-low tones being marked by doubled high- and low-tone diacritics, and the major prosodic break being marked as a double minor break , it is not specifically regulated by the IPA. (Note that transcription marks are similar: double slashes indicate extra (morpho)-phonemic, double square brackets especially precise, and double parentheses especially unintelligible.)
For example, the stress mark may be doubled to indicate an extra degree of stress, such as prosodic stress in English. An example in French, with a single stress mark for normal prosodic stress at the end of each prosodic unit (marked as a minor prosodic break), and a double stress mark for contrastive/emphatic stress: ''.'' Similarly, a doubled secondary stress mark is commonly used for tertiary (extra-light) stress. In a similar vein, the effectively obsolete (though never retired) staveless tone letters were once doubled for an emphatic rising intonation and an emphatic falling intonation .
Length is commonly extended by repeating the length mark, as in English ''shhh!'' , or for "overlong" segments in Estonian:
* ''vere'' 'blood en.sg., ''veere'' 'edge en.sg., ''veere'' 'roll mp. 2nd sg.
* ''lina'' 'sheet', ''linna'' 'town en. sg., ''linna'' 'town
ne. sg.
NE, Ne or ne may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* Neutral Evil, an alignment in the American role-playing game ''Dungeons & Dragons''
* New Edition, an American vocal group
* Nicomachean Ethics, a collection of ten books by Greek philosopher A ...
(Normally additional degrees of length are handled by the extra-short or half-long diacritic, but the first two words in each of the Estonian examples are analyzed as simply short and long, requiring a different remedy for the final words.)
Occasionally other diacritics are doubled:
* Rhoticity in Badaga "mouth", "bangle", and "crop".
* Mild and strong aspirations, , .Sometimes the obsolete transcription (with a turned apostrophe) for weak aspiration vs. for strong aspiration is still seen.
*
Nasalization
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internation ...
, as in
Palantla Chinantec
Palantla Chinantec, also known as ''Chinanteco de San Pedro Tlatepuzco'', is a major Chinantecan language of Mexico, spoken in San Juan Palantla and a couple dozen neighboring towns in northern Oaxaca. The variety of San Mateo Yetla, known as ...
lightly nasalized vs heavily nasalized , though in extIPA the latter indicates
velopharyngeal frication
A velopharyngeal fricative, also known as a posterior nasal fricative, is a sound produced by some children with speech disorders, including some with a cleft palate, as a substitute for sibilants (), which cannot be produced with a cleft pala ...
.
* Weak vs strong
ejective
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some ...
s, , .
* Especially lowered, e.g. (or , if the former symbol does not display properly) for as a weak fricative in some pronunciations of ''register''.
* Especially retracted, e.g. or , though some care might be needed to distinguish this from indications of alveolar or alveolarized articulation in extIPA, e.g. .
* The transcription of strident and
harsh voice
Harsh voice, also called ventricular voice or (in some high-tone registers) pressed voice, is the production of speech sounds (typically vowels) with a constricted laryngeal cavity, which generally involves epiglottal co-articulation. Harsh voic ...
as extra-creaky may be motivated by the similarities of these phonations.
Ambiguous characters
A number of IPA characters are not consistently used for their official values. A distinction between voiced fricatives and approximants is only partially implemented, for example. Even with the relatively recent addition of the palatal fricative and the velar approximant to the alphabet, other letters, though defined as fricatives, are often ambiguous between fricative and approximant. For forward places, and can generally be assumed to be fricatives unless they carry a lowering diacritic. Rearward, however, and are perhaps more commonly intended to be approximants even without a lowering diacritic. and are similarly either fricatives or approximants, depending on the language, or even glottal "transitions", without that often being specified in the transcription.
Another common ambiguity is among the palatal consonants. and are not uncommonly used as a typographic convenience for affricates, typically and , while and are commonly used for palatalized alveolar and . To some extent this may be an effect of analysis, but it is often common for people to match up available letters to the sounds of a language, without overly worrying whether they are phonetically accurate.
It has been argued that the lower-pharyngeal (epiglottal) fricatives and are better characterized as trills, rather than as fricatives that have incidental trilling. This has the advantage of merging the upper-pharyngeal fricatives together with the epiglottal plosive and trills into a single pharyngeal column in the consonant chart. However, in Shilha Berber the epiglottal fricatives are not trilled. Although they might be transcribed to indicate this, the far more common transcription is , which is therefore ambiguous between languages.
Among vowels, is officially a front vowel, but is more commonly treated as a central vowel. The difference, to the extent it is even possible, is not phonemic in any language.
Three letters are not needed, but are retained due to inertia and would be hard to justify today by the standards of the modern IPA. appears because it is found in English; officially it is a fricative, with terminology dating to the days before 'fricative' and 'approximant' were distinguished. Based on how all other fricatives and approximants are transcribed, one would expect either for a fricative (not how it is actually used) or for an approximant. Indeed, outside of English transcription, that is what is more commonly found in the literature. is another historic remnant. Although a common allophone of in particular It is only phonemically distinct in a single language (Kukuya), a fact that was discovered after it was standardized in the IPA. A number of consonants without dedicated IPA letters are found in many more languages than that; is retained because of its historical use for European languages, where it could easily be normalized to . There have been several votes to retire from the IPA, but so far they have failed. Finally, is officially a simultaneous postalveolar and velar fricative, a realization that does not appear to exist in any language. It is retained because it is convenient for the transcription of Swedish, where it is used for a consonant that has various realizations in different dialects. That is, it is not actually a phonetic character at all, but a phonemic one, which is officially beyond the purview of the IPA alphabet.
For all phonetic notation, it is good practice for an author to specify exactly what they mean by the symbols that they use.
Superscript IPA letters may be used to indicate secondary articulation, releases and other transitions, shades of sound, epenthetic and incompletely articulated sounds. In 2020, the International Phonetic Association endorsed the encoding of superscript IPA letters in a proposal to the Unicode Commission for broader coverage of the IPA alphabet. The proposal covered all IPA letters that were not yet supported (apart from the tone letters), including the implicit retroflex letters , as well as the two length marks and old-style affricate ligatures.Kirk Miller & Michael Ashby L2/20-252R Unicode request for IPA modifier-letters (a), pulmonicKirk Miller & Michael Ashby L2/20-253R Unicode request for IPA modifier letters (b), non-pulmonic. A separate request by the
International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association The International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) is an international scholarly association dedicated to the study of speech disorders and language disorders. It was founded in 1991. The Association sponsors a biennial con ...
for an expansion of extIPA coverage endorsed superscript variants of all extIPA fricative letters, specifically for the fricative release of consonants. Unicode placed the new superscript ("modifier") letters in a new
Latin Extended-F
Latin Extended-F is a Unicode block containing modifier letters, nearly all IPA and extIPA, for phonetic transcription. The Latin Extended-F and -G blocks contain the first Latin characters defined outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane
In th ...
block.
The Unicode characters for superscript (modifier) IPA and extIPA letters are as follows. Characters for sounds with secondary articulation are set off in parentheses and placed below the base letters:
The spacing diacritic for ejective consonants, U+2BC, works with superscript letters despite not being superscript itself: . If a distinction needs to be made, the combining apostrophe U+315 may be used: . The spacing diacritic should be used for a baseline letter with a superscript release, such as or , where the scope of the apostrophe includes the non-superscript letter, but the combining apostrophe U+315 might be used to indicate a weakly articulated ejective consonant, where the whole consonant is written as a superscript, or together with U+2BC when separate apostrophes have scope over the base and modifier letters, as in .
Note that the para-IPA letter for a central reduced vowel, , is supported, but its rounded equivalent, , is not, although in some fonts it might be approximated using the stroke diacritic: .
The precomposed Unicode rhotic vowel letters are not supported. The rhotic diacritic should be used instead: .
Superscript length marks can be used for indicating the length of aspiration of a consonant, e.g. . Another option is to double the diacritic: .
Superscript letters can be meaningfully modified by
combining diacritics
In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents).
Unicode also ...
, just as baseline letters can. For example, a superscript dental nasal is , a superscript voiceless velar nasal is , and labial-velar prenasalization is . Although the diacritic may seem a bit oversized compared to the superscript letter it modifies, e.g. , this can be an aid to legibility, just as it is with the composite superscript c-cedilla and rhotic vowels shown above.
Spacing diacritics, however, as in , cannot be secondarily superscripted in plain text: .In this instance, the old IPA letter for , , has a superscript variant in Unicode, U+1DB5 , as does the lateral, U+1DDA , but that is not generally the case.
Superscript wildcards are partially supported: e.g. (prenasalized consonant), (prestopped nasal), (fricative release), (epenthetic plosive), (tone-bearing syllable), (liquid or lateral release), (rhotic or resonant release), (off-glide/diphthong), (fleeting vowel). However, superscript for sibilant release and superscript for fleeting/epenthetic click are not supported as of Unicode 16. Other basic Latin superscript wildcards for tone and weak indeterminate sounds, as described below, are mostly supported:
:.
Obsolete and nonstandard symbols
A number of IPA letters and diacritics have been retired or replaced over the years. This number includes duplicate symbols, symbols that were replaced due to user preference, and unitary symbols that were rendered with diacritics or digraphs to reduce the inventory of the IPA. The rejected symbols are now considered obsolete, though some are still seen in the literature.
The IPA once had several pairs of duplicate symbols from alternative proposals, but eventually settled on one or the other. An example is the vowel letter , rejected in favor of . Affricates were once transcribed with ligatures, such as (and others not found in Unicode). These have been officially retired but are still used. Letters for specific combinations of primary and secondary articulation have also been mostly retired, with the idea that such features should be indicated with tie bars or diacritics: for is one. In addition, the rare voiceless implosives, , were dropped soon after their introduction and are now usually written . The original set of click letters, , was retired but is still sometimes seen, as the current pipe letters can cause problems with legibility, especially when used with brackets ( or / /), the letter , or the
prosodic
In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, st ...
marks . (For this reason, some publications which use the current IPA pipe letters disallow IPA brackets.)
Individual non-IPA letters may find their way into publications that otherwise use the standard IPA. This is especially common with:
* Affricates, such as the Americanist
barred lambda
The barred lambda ƛ, (in Unicode ), also called running man, (strictly speaking, this refers to the
for or for .The motivation for this may vary. Some authors find the tie bars displeasing but the lack of tie bars confusing (i.e. for as distinct from ), while others simply prefer to have one letter for each segmental phoneme in a language.
* The
Karlgren
Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren (; 15 October 1889 – 20 October 1978) was a Swedish sinologist and linguist who pioneered the study of Chinese historical phonology using modern comparative methods. In the early 20th century, Karlgren conducte ...
letters for Chinese vowels,
* Digits for tonal phonemes that have conventional numbers in a local tradition, such as the four tones of Standard Chinese. This may be more convenient for comparison between related languages and dialects than a phonetic transcription would be, because tones vary more unpredictably than segmental phonemes do.
* Digits for tone levels, which are simpler to typeset, though the lack of standardization can cause confusion (e.g. is high tone in some languages but low tone in others; may be high, medium or low tone, depending on the local convention).
* Iconic extensions of standard IPA letters that can be readily understood, such as retroflex and . These are referred to in the ''Handbook'' and have been included in IPA requests for Unicode support.
In addition, it is common to see ''ad hoc'' typewriter substitutions, generally capital letters, for when IPA support is not available, e.g. A for , B for or , D for , or , E for , F or P for , G , I , L , N , O , S , T or , U , V , X , Z , as well as @ for and 7 or ? for . (See also
SAMPA
__NOTOC__
The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for ...
and
X-SAMPA
The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, a ...
substitute notation.)
Extensions
The
Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internatio ...
, commonly abbreviated "extIPA" and sometimes called "Extended IPA", are symbols whose original purpose was to accurately transcribe
disordered speech
Speech disorders or speech impairments are a type of communication disorder in which normal speech is disrupted. This can mean stuttering, lisps, etc. Someone who is unable to speak due to a speech disorder is considered mute. Speech skills are ...
. At the
Kiel Convention
The International Phonetic Alphabet was created soon after the International Phonetic Association was established in the late 19th century. It was intended as an international system of phonetic transcription for oral languages, originally for p ...
in 1989, a group of linguists drew up the initial extensions, which were based on the previous work of the PRDS (Phonetic Representation of Disordered Speech) Group in the early 1980s. The extensions were first published in 1990, then modified, and published again in 1994 in the ''Journal of the International Phonetic Association'', when they were officially adopted by the ICPLA. While the original purpose was to transcribe disordered speech, linguists have used the extensions to designate a number of sounds within standard communication, such as hushing, gnashing teeth, and smacking lips, as well as regular lexical sounds such as lateral fricatives that do not have standard IPA symbols.
In addition to the Extensions to the IPA for disordered speech, there are the conventions of the Voice Quality Symbols, which include a number of symbols for additional airstream mechanisms and secondary articulations in what they call "voice quality".
Associated notation
Capital letters and various characters on the number row of the keyboard are commonly used to extend the alphabet in various ways.
Associated symbols
There are various punctuation-like conventions for linguistic transcription that are commonly used together with IPA. Some of the more common are:
;
:(a) A reconstructed form.
:(b) An ungrammatical form (including an unphonemic form).
;
:(a) A reconstructed form, deeper (more ancient) than a single , used when reconstructing even further back from already-starred forms.
:(b) An ungrammatical form. A less common convention than (b), this is sometimes used when reconstructed and ungrammatical forms occur in the same text.
;: An ungrammatical form. A less common convention than (b), this is sometimes used when reconstructed and ungrammatical forms occur in the same text.
;: A doubtfully grammatical form.
;: A generalized form, such as a typical shape of a
wanderwort
A (, 'migrant word', plural ; capitalized like all German nouns) is a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another, usually in connection with trade. As such, are ...
that has not actually been reconstructed.
;: A word boundary – e.g. for a word-initial vowel.
;: A
phonological word
The phonological word or prosodic word (also called pword, PrWd; symbolised as ω) is a constituent in the phonological hierarchy higher than the syllable and the foot but lower than intonational phrase and the phonological phrase. It is larg ...
boundary; e.g. for a high tone that occurs in such a position.
Capital letters
Full capital letters are not used as IPA symbols, except as typewriter substitutes (e.g. N for , S for , O for – see
SAMPA
__NOTOC__
The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for ...
). They are, however, often used in conjunction with the IPA in two cases:
# for (archi)phonemes and for
natural class In phonology, a natural class is a set of phonemes in a language that share certain distinctive features. A natural class is determined by participation in shared phonological processes, described using the minimum number of features necessary for d ...
es of sounds (that is, as wildcards). The extIPA chart, for example, uses capital letters as wildcards in its illustrations.
# as carrying letters for the Voice Quality Symbols.
Wildcards are commonly used in phonology to summarize syllable or word shapes, or to show the evolution of classes of sounds. For example, the possible syllable shapes of Mandarin can be abstracted as ranging from (an atonic vowel) to (a consonant-glide-vowel-nasal syllable with tone), and
word-final devoicing
Final-obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as Catalan, German, Dutch, Breton, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Turkish, and Wolof. In such languages, voiced obstruents in fina ...
may be schematized as → /_#. In speech pathology, capital letters represent indeterminate sounds, and may be superscripted to indicate they are weakly articulated: e.g. is a weak indeterminate alveolar, a weak indeterminate velar.
There is a degree of variation between authors as to the capital letters used, but for , for and for are ubiquitous in English-language material. Other common conventions are for (tonicity), for , for , for ,As in
Afrasianist phonetic notation Comparative work of the Afroasiatic languages uses a semi-conventionalized set of symbols that are somewhat different than the International Phonetic Alphabet and other phonetic notations. The more salient differences include the letters for IPA , ...
. is particularly ambiguous. It has been used for 'stop', 'fricative', 'sibilant', 'sonorant' and 'semivowel'. On the other hand, plosive/stop is frequently abbreviated , or . The illustrations given here use, as much as possible, letters that are capital versions of members of the sets they stand for: IPA is a nasal and is any nasal; is a plosive, a fricative, a sibilant, both a lateral and a liquid, both a rhotic and a resonant, and a click. is an obstruent in Americanist notation, where it stands for . An alternative wildcard for 'glide', , fits this pattern, but is much less common than in English-language sources. for , for or , for or ,At least in the notation of syllables, the is understood to include liquids and glides but to exclude nasals, as in Bennett (2020: 115) 'Click Phonology', in Sands (ed.), ''Click Consonants'', Brill for , for , for may instead be , and may stand for . and for , respectively, and for . The letters can be modified with IPA diacritics, for example for , for , or for , for , for , for , for , or for , for and for . , , are also commonly used for high, mid and low tone, with for rising tone and for falling tone, rather than transcribing them overly precisely with IPA tone letters or with ambiguous digits.Somewhat more precisely, and are sometimes used for low and high rising tones, and , for high and low falling tones; occasionally for 'rising' or for 'falling' is also seen.
Typical examples of archiphonemic use of capital letters are for the Turkish harmonic vowel set };For other Turkic languages, may be restricted to } (that is, to ''ı i''), to ''u ü'', to ''a e/ä'', etc. for the conflated flapped middle consonant of American English ''writer'' and ''rider''; for the homorganic syllable-coda nasal of languages such as Spanish and Japanese (essentially equivalent to the wild-card usage of the letter); and in cases where a phonemic trill and flap are indeterminate, as in Spanish ''enrejar'' (the ''n'' is homorganic and the first ''r'' is a trill but the second is variable). Similar usage is found for ''phonemic'' analysis, where a language does not distinguish sounds that have separate letters in the IPA. For instance, Castillian Spanish has been analyzed as having phonemes and , which surface as and in voiceless environments and as and in voiced environments (e.g. ''hazte'' , → , vs ''hazme'' , → ; or ''las manos'' , → ).
, and have completely different meanings as Voice Quality Symbols, where they stand for "voice" (generally meaning secondary articulation, as in "nasal voice", not phonetic voicing), "falsetto" and "creak". They may also take diacritics that indicate what kind of voice quality an utterance has, and may be used to extract a suprasegmental feature that occurs on all susceptible segments in a stretch of IPA. For instance, the transcription of
Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well ...
'cat' and 'cats' ( Islay dialect) can be made more economical by extracting the suprasegmental labialization of the words: and . The usual wildcard X or C might be used instead of V so that the reader does not misinterpret as meaning that only vowels are labialized (i.e. for all segments labialized, for all consonants labialized), or the carrier letter may be omitted altogether (e.g. , or ). (See for other transcription conventions.)
Segments without letters
The blank cells on the IPA chart can be filled without much difficulty if the need arises. The expected retroflex letter forms have appeared in the literature for the
retroflex implosive
The voiced retroflex implosive is a type of consonantal sound. It is not known to be phonemically distinct from alveolar in any language. Sindhi has an implosive that varies between dental and retroflex articulation, while Oromo, Saraiki and ...
, the
retroflex lateral flap
The voiced retroflex lateral flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The expected symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ().Kirk Miller & Michael AshbyL2/20-252RUnicode request for IPA modifier-letters (a), ...
and the
retroflex click
The retroflex clicks are a family of click consonants known only from the Central !Kung dialects of Namibia. They are sub-apical retroflex and should not be confused with the more widespread postalveolar clicks, which are sometimes mistakenly ...
s ; the first is mentioned in the IPA ''Handbook'' and the IPA requested Unicode support for superscript variants of all three. The missing voiceless lateral fricatives are provided for by the extIPA. The epiglottal trill is arguably covered by the generally trilled epiglottal "fricatives" . Labiodental plosives appear in some old Bantuist texts. ''Ad hoc'' near-close central vowels are used in some descriptions of English. Diacritics can duplicate some of these; are now universal for labiodental plosives, are common for the central vowels and is occasionally seen for the lateral flap. Diacritics are able to fill in most of the remainder of the charts. If a sound cannot be transcribed, an asterisk may be used, either as a letter or as a diacritic (as in sometimes seen for the
Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
"fortis" velar).
Consonants
Representations of consonant sounds outside of the core set are created by adding diacritics to letters with similar sound values. The Spanish bilabial and dental approximants are commonly written as lowered fricatives, and respectively.Dedicated letters have been proposed, such as rotated and , reversed and , or small-capital and . Ball, Rahilly & Lowry (2017) ''Phonetics for speech pathology'', 3rd edition, Equinox, Sheffield. Similarly, voiced lateral fricatives would be written as raised lateral approximants, ; extIPA provides for the first of these. A few languages such as Banda have a bilabial flap as the preferred allophone of what is elsewhere a labiodental flap. It has been suggested that this be written with the labiodental flap letter and the advanced diacritic, .
Similarly, a labiodental trill would be written (bilabial trill and the dental sign), and labiodental stops rather than with the ''ad hoc'' letters sometimes found in the literature. Other taps can be written as extra-short plosives or laterals, e.g. , though in some cases the diacritic would need to be written below the letter. A
retroflex trill
The voiced retroflex trill is a sound that has been reported in Toda and confirmed with laboratory measurements. Peter Ladefoged transcribes it with the IPA symbol that is normally associated with the retroflex flap, . Although the tongue start ...
can be written as a retracted , just as non-subapical retroflex fricatives sometimes are. The remaining consonants – the uvular laterals ( ''etc.'') and the palatal trill – while not strictly impossible, are very difficult to pronounce and are unlikely to occur even as allophones in the world's languages.
Vowels
The vowels are similarly manageable by using diacritics for raising, lowering, fronting, backing, centering, and mid-centering. For example, the unrounded equivalent of can be transcribed as mid-centered , and the rounded equivalent of as raised or lowered (though for those who conceive of vowel space as a triangle, simple already is the rounded equivalent of ). True mid vowels are lowered or raised , while centered and (or, less commonly, ) are near-close and open central vowels, respectively. The only known vowels that cannot be represented in this scheme are vowels with unexpected roundedness, which would require a dedicated diacritic, such as protruded and compressed (or protruded and compressed ).
Symbol names
An IPA symbol is often distinguished from the sound it is intended to represent, since there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between letter and sound in broad transcription, making articulatory descriptions such as "mid front rounded vowel" or "voiced velar stop" unreliable. While the ''Handbook of the International Phonetic Association'' states that no official names exist for its symbols, it admits the presence of one or two common names for each. The symbols also have nonce names in the
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
standard. In many cases, the names in Unicode and the IPA ''Handbook'' differ. For example, the ''Handbook'' calls "epsilon", while Unicode calls it "small letter open e".
The traditional names of the Latin and Greek letters are usually used for unmodified letters.
For example, the IPA ''Handbook'' lists as "lower-case P" and as "chi." (International Phonetic Association, ''Handbook'', p. 171)
Letters which are not directly derived from these alphabets, such as , may have a variety of names, sometimes based on the appearance of the symbol or on the sound that it represents. In Unicode, some of the letters of Greek origin have Latin forms for use in IPA; the others use the characters from the Greek block.
For diacritics, there are two methods of naming. For traditional diacritics, the IPA notes the name in a well known language; for example, is "e-
acute
Acute may refer to:
Science and technology
* Acute angle
** Acute triangle
** Acute, a leaf shape in the glossary of leaf morphology
* Acute (medicine), a disease that it is of short duration and of recent onset.
** Acute toxicity, the adverse eff ...
", based on the name of the diacritic in English and French. Non-traditional diacritics are often named after objects they resemble, so is called "d-bridge".
Geoffrey Pullum
Geoffrey Keith Pullum (; born 8 March 1945) is a British and American linguist specialising in the study of English. He is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Pullum is a co-author of ''The Cambridge Gram ...
and
William Ladusaw
William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of Engl ...
list a variety of names in use for IPA symbols, both current and retired, in their ''
Phonetic Symbol Guide
The ''Phonetic Symbol Guide'' is a book by Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw that explains the histories and uses of the symbols of various phonetic transcription conventions. It was published in 1986, with a second edition in 1996, by the Un ...
''; many of these found their way into Unicode.
Computer support
Unicode
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
supports nearly all of the IPA alphabet. Apart from basic Latin and Greek and general punctuation, the primary blocks are
IPA Extensions
IPA Extensions is a block (U+0250–U+02AF) of the Unicode standard that contains full size letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Both modern and historical characters are included, as well as former and proposed IPA signs ...
,
Spacing Modifier Letters
Spacing Modifier Letters is a Unicode block containing characters for the IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
...
Phonetic Extensions
Phonetic Extensions is a Unicode block containing phonetic characters used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Old Irish phonetic notation, the Oxford English dictionary and American dictionaries, and Americanist and Russianist phonetic notations. ...
,
Phonetic Extensions Supplement
Phonetic Extensions Supplement is a Unicode block containing characters for specialized and deprecated forms of the International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation ...
,
Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement
Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement is a Unicode block containing combining characters for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Medievalist notations, and German dialectology (Teuthonista). It is an extension of the diacritic characters found in the ...
, and scattered characters elsewhere. The
extended IPA
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internatio ...
is supported primarily by those blocks and
Latin Extended-G
Latin Extended-G is a Unicode block containing additional characters for phonetic transcription. The Latin Extended-F and -G blocks contain the first Latin characters defined outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
As of early 2022, only ...
.
IPA numbers
After the
Kiel Convention
The International Phonetic Alphabet was created soon after the International Phonetic Association was established in the late 19th century. It was intended as an international system of phonetic transcription for oral languages, originally for p ...
in 1989, most IPA symbols were assigned an identifying number to prevent confusion between similar characters during the printing of manuscripts. The codes were never much used and have been superseded by Unicode.
Typefaces
Many typefaces have support for IPA characters, but good diacritic rendering remains rare.
Web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...
s generally do not need any configuration to display IPA characters, provided that a typeface capable of doing so is available to the operating system.
System fonts
The ubiquitous
Arial
Arial (also called Arial MT) is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.1 on, some other Microsoft software ap ...
and
Times New Roman
Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper ''The Times'' in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration w ...
fonts include IPA characters, but they are neither complete (especially Arial) nor render diacritics properly. The basic Latin
Noto fonts
Noto is a font family comprising over 100 individual fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. , Noto fonts cover all 93 scripts defined in Unicode version 6.1 (April 2012), although fewer than ...
are better, only failing with the more obscure characters. The proprietary Calibri font, which is the default font of
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketi ...
, has nearly complete IPA support with good diacritic rendering.
Other commercial fonts
Brill
Brill may refer to:
Places
* Brielle (sometimes "Den Briel"), a town in the western Netherlands
* Brill, Buckinghamshire, a village in England
* Brill, Cornwall, a small village to the west of Constantine, Cornwall, UK
* Brill, Wisconsin, an un ...
has good IPA support. It is a commercial font but freely available for non-commercial use.
Free fonts
Typefaces that provide nearly full IPA support and properly render diacritics include
Gentium Plus
Gentium (, from the Latin for "of the nations") is a Unicode serif typeface designed by Victor Gaultney. Gentium fonts are free and open source software, and are released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL), which permits modification and redi ...
Doulos SIL
Doulos SIL (Ancient Greek for "slave") is a serif typeface developed by SIL International, very similar to Times or Times New Roman. Unlike Times New Roman, Doulos only has a single face, Regular. The goal of its design according to the SIL In ...
, and Andika.
In addition to the support found in other fonts, these fonts support the full range of old-style (pre-Kiel) staveless tone letters, which do not have dedicated Unicode support, through an option to suppress the stave of the Chao tone letters.
ASCII and keyboard transliterations
Several systems have been developed that map the IPA symbols to
ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
characters. Notable systems include
SAMPA
__NOTOC__
The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for ...
and
X-SAMPA
The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, a ...
. The usage of mapping systems in on-line text has to some extent been adopted in the context input methods, allowing convenient keying of IPA characters that would be otherwise unavailable on standard keyboard layouts.
IETF language tags
IETF language tag
An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the s ...
s have registered as a variant subtag identifying text as written in IPA.
Thus, an IPA transcription of English could be tagged as .
For the use of IPA without attribution to a concrete language, is available.
Gboard
Gboard is a virtual keyboard app developed by Google for Android and iOS devices. It was first released on iOS in May 2016, followed by a release on Android in December 2016, debuting as a major update to the already-established Google Keyboa ...
for Android added an IPA keyboard to its platform. For iOS there are multiple free keyboard layouts available, e.g. "IPA Phonetic Keyboard".
List of international common standards
A list of international common and basic technical standards, which have been established worldwide and are related by their frequent and widespread use. These standards are conventionally accepted as best practice and used globally by industry a ...
*
*
*
*
* – inventor of IPA-based
Yakut scripts
There are 4 stages in the history of Yakut writing systems:
* until the early 1920s – writing based on the Cyrillic alphabet;
* 1917–1929 – Novgorodov's writing system, which is based on the Latin alphabet;
* 1929–1939 – a unified alpha ...
* provides IPA support for
LaTeX
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...