History
In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguistDescription
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, anLetter forms
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with theTypography and iconicity
The International Phonetic Alphabet is based on theBrackets 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
SeveralModifying 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. (SeeUsage
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: inLinguists
IPA is popular for transcription by linguists. Some American linguists, however, use a mix of IPA withDictionaries
English
Many British dictionaries, including theOther languages
The IPA is also not universal among dictionaries in languages other than English. Monolingual dictionaries of languages with phonemic orthography, 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 [нэ́] in brackets to the French loan-word ''пенсне'' (') to indicate that the final does not Iotation, 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 language, 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 language, Hausa, Fula language, Fula, Akan language, Akan, Gbe languages, Manding languages, Lingala language, Lingala, etc. Capital case variants have been created for use in these languages. For example, Kabiyé language, Kabiyè of northern Togo has African D, Ɖ ɖ, Eng (letter), Ŋ ŋ, Latin gamma, Ɣ ɣ, Open O, Ɔ ɔ, Latin epsilon, Ɛ ɛ, Ʋ, Ʋ ʋ. These, and others, are supported byClassical 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 sounds, pulmonic consonants, non-pulmonic consonants, and vowels. Pulmonic consonant letters are arranged singly or in pairs of voiceless (tenuis consonant, 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 [their] rarity 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 Egressive, pulmonic consonant is a consonant made by obstructing the glottis (the space between the vocal cords) or Human mouth, 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 voice (phonetics), voiced consonant (except breathy voice, 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 asNon-pulmonic consonants
Non-pulmonic consonants are sounds whose airflow is not dependent on the lungs. These include click consonant, clicks (found in the Khoisan languages and some neighboring Bantu languages of Africa), Implosive consonant, implosives (found in languages such as Sindhi language, Sindhi, Hausa language, Hausa, Swahili language, Swahili and Vietnamese language, Vietnamese), and ejective consonant, ejectives (found in many Indigenous languages of the Americas, Amerindian and Languages of the Caucasus, 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, contour click, 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 Voiced retroflex implosive, 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 Glottalic consonant, glottalized but pulmonic sonorants, such as , , , (also transcribable as creaky , , , ).Affricates
Affricate consonant, Affricates and Doubly articulated consonant, 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 Place of articulation, 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. Notes * , the sj-sound, 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 (U+034F) needs to be used, as in 'chewed' (Margi language, 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. 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. 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 Roundedness, 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 (phonetics), retraction diacritic or the Relative articulation#Centralized vowels, centralized diacritic may be added to indicate an open central vowel, as in or .Diacritics and prosodic notation
Suprasegmentals
These symbols describe the features of a language above the Phonological hierarchy, level of individual consonants and vowels, that is, at the level of syllable, word or phrase. These include prosody (linguistics), prosody, pitch, length, stress (linguistics), stress, intensity, tone (linguistics), tone and gemination of the sounds of a language, as well as the rhythm 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, 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 (linguistics), 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 #Comparative degree, 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 (prosody), 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 (linguistics), mora 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, 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, and for the intonation of non-tonal languages.Maddieson and others have noted that a phonemic/phonetic distinction should be handled by /slash/ or [bracket] delimiters. 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 tones, 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 (). 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 unit, 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 (phonetics), Length is commonly extended by repeating the length mark, as in English ''shhh!'' , or for "overlong" segments in Estonian phonology, Estonian: * ''vere'' 'blood [gen.sg.]', ''veere'' 'edge [gen.sg.]', ''veere'' 'roll [imp. 2nd sg.]' * ''lina'' 'sheet', ''linna'' 'town [gen. sg.]', ''linna'' 'town [ine. sg.]' (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: * R-colored vowel, Rhoticity in Badaga language, Badaga "mouth", "bangle", and "crop". * Mild and strong Aspiration (phonetics), aspirations, , .Sometimes the obsolete transcription (with a turned apostrophe) for weak aspiration vs. for strong aspiration is still seen. * Nasal vowel, Nasalization, as in Palantla Chinantec lightly nasalized vs heavily nasalized , though in extIPA the latter indicates velopharyngeal frication. * Weak vs strong ejectives, , . * 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 vowel, strident and harsh voice 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 language, 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 [m] 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
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 theExtensions
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated "extIPA" and sometimes called "Extended IPA", are symbols whose original purpose was to accurately transcribe Speech disorder, disordered speech. At theAssociated 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 Comparative linguistics, reconstructed form. :(b) An Grammaticality, 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 that has not actually been reconstructed. ;: A word boundary – e.g. for a word-initial vowel. ;: A phonological word 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 chart for English, SAMPA). They are, however, often used in conjunction with the IPA in two cases: # for archiphoneme, (archi)phonemes and for natural classes 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 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. 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 [ʞ] 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 '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 retroflex lateral flap and the retroflex clicks ; 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 phonology, Korean "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 languages, 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 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 word, nonce names in theComputer support
Unicode
IPA numbers
After theTypefaces
Many typefaces have support for IPA characters, but good diacritic rendering remains rare. Web browsers 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 and Times New Roman fonts include IPA characters, but they are neither complete (especially Arial) nor render diacritics properly. The basic Latin Noto fonts are better, only failing with the more obscure characters. The proprietary Calibri font, which is the default font of Microsoft Office, has nearly complete IPA support with good diacritic rendering.Other commercial fonts
Brill Publishers#Brill Typeface, Brill 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, Gentium Plus, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, and Andika (font), 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 characters. Notable systems include SAMPA and X-SAMPA. 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 tags 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.Computer input using on-screen keyboard
Online IPA keyboard utilities are available, though none of them cover the complete range of IPA symbols and diacritics.Online IPA keyboard utilities include thSee also
* * * * * * * * Index of phonetics articles * * * List of international common standards * * * * * – inventor of IPA-based Yakut scripts * provides IPA support for LaTeX * * * *Notes
References
Further reading
* * * * * (hb); (pb). * * * * (hb); (pb). * * *External links
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