International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form.International Phonetic Association (IPA), ''Handbook''. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.

The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in oral language: phones, phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech—such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft lip and cleft palate—an extended set of symbols may be used.

Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types: letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English 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; 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 (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 (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 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, formed what would be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association (in French, ).International Phonetic Association, ''Handbook'', pp. 194–196 Their original alphabet was based on a spelling reform for English known as the Romic alphabet, 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 in a letter to Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, 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 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'', pp. 152, 209 The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap. Apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely of renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces.

Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology (extIPA) were created in 1990 and were officially adopted by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association 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 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 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 phonemes, 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 nasal of Japanese), though one remains: , used for the sj-sound 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 consonants and vowels, 31 diacritics are used to modify these, and 17 additional signs indicate suprasegmental qualities such as length, tone, stress, 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 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 or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, , originally had the form of a dotless question mark, and derives from an apostrophe. A few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, , were inspired by other writing systems (in this case, the Arabic letter ⟨⟩, ', via the reversed apostrophe).

Some letter forms derive from existing letters:
# The right-swinging tail, as in , indicates retroflex articulation. It originates from the hook of an ''r''.
# The top hook, as in , indicates implosion.
# Several nasal consonants 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 letters , and also in extIPA, indicate more guttural 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, 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). Hence, the consonant letters , , , (hard) , (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 equivalents of the source letters, and small capital letters usually represent uvular 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 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 on a musical scale.

Beyond the letters themselves, there are a variety of secondary symbols which aid in transcription. Diacritic 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 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.) Not all aspects of the alphabet can be accommodated in a chart of the size published by the IPA. The alveolo-palatal 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 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 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, in Cockney, 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 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 and some learner's dictionaries such as the ''Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary'' and the ''Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary'', 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 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 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 for transcription of foreign words.Monolingual Hebrew dictionaries use pronunciation respelling for words with unusual spelling; for example, the ''Even-Shoshan Dictionary'' 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'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.

Standard orthographies and case variants

IPA letters have been incorporated into the alphabets of various languages, notably via the Africa Alphabet in many sub-Saharan languages such as Hausa, Fula, Akan, Gbe languages, Manding languages, Lingala, etc. Capital case variants have been created for use in these languages. For example, Kabiyè of northern Togo has Ɖ ɖ, Ŋ ŋ, Ɣ ɣ, Ɔ ɔ, Ɛ ɛ, Ʋ ʋ. These, and others, are supported by Unicode, but appear in Latin ranges other than the IPA extensions.

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'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 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 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 consonant is a consonant made by obstructing the glottis (the space between the vocal cords) or oral cavity (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, 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 (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 folds typically co-occurs.
* Some listed phones are not known to exist as phonemes 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 and some neighboring Bantu languages of Africa), implosives (found in languages such as Sindhi, Hausa, Swahili and Vietnamese), and ejectives (found in many Amerindian and Caucasian languages).

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 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, , 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 but pulmonic sonorants, such as , , , (also transcribable as creaky , , , ).

Affricates

Affricates 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 consonants are sounds that involve two simultaneous places of articulation (are pronounced using two parts of the vocal tract). 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 Laurent Gbagbo