The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by

John C. Wells John Christopher Wells (born 11 March 1939) is a British phonetician and Esperantist. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics. Career Wells ea ...

, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the 1993 version of

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

(IPA). The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII. SAMPA was devised as a

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to work around the inability of

text encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values that ...

s to represent IPA symbols. Later, as Unicode support for IPA symbols became more widespread, the necessity for a separate, computer-readable system for representing the IPA in ASCII decreased. However, X-SAMPA is still useful as the basis for an input method for true IPA.

Summary

Notes

* The IPA symbols that are ordinary lower case letters have the same value in X-SAMPA as they do in the IPA. * X-SAMPA uses backslashes as modifying suffixes to create new symbols. For example, O is a distinct sound from O\, to which it bears no relation. Such use of the backslash character can be a problem, since many programs interpret it as an

escape character In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character (computing), character that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharac ...

for the character following it. For example, such X-SAMPA symbols do not work in

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, so backslashes must be replaced with some other symbol (e.g., an

asterisk The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...

: '*') when adding phonemic transcription to an EMU speech database. The backslash has no fixed meaning. * X-SAMPA diacritics follow the symbols they modify. Except for ~ for nasalization, = for syllabicity, and ` for retroflexion and rhotacization, diacritics are joined to the character with the underscore character _. * The underscore character is also used to encode the IPA tiebar: k_p codes for /k͡p/. * The numbers _1 to _6 are reserved diacritics as shorthand for language-specific tone numbers. * The IETF language tags registry has assigned as the subtag for text transcribed in X-SAMPA.

Lower-case symbols

Charts

Consonants

* Asterisks (*) mark sounds that do not have X-SAMPA symbols. Daggers (†) mark IPA symbols that have recently been added to Unicode. Since April 2008, the latter is the case of the labiodental flap, symbolized by a right-hook ''v'' in the IPA: Labiodental flap (Gentium)

. A dedicated symbol for the labiodental flap does not yet exist in X-SAMPA.

Vowels

References

External links

Computer-coding the IPA: A proposed extension of SAMPA

X-SAMPA to IPA to CXS converter

Web-based translator for X-SAMPA documents.
Produces Unicode text, XML text, PostScript, PDF, or LaTeX TIPA.
Z-SAMPA
a backward-compatible extension of X-SAMPA sometimes used for conlangs {{Latin script SAMPA 1995 in computing Writing systems introduced in the 1990s University College London