ᶗ

Transcription practices

The IPA adopted several ways to transcribe r-colored vowels in its 1947 chart: the turned r ⟨ɹ⟩; the superscript turned r ⟨əʴ⟩, ⟨aʴ⟩, ⟨eʴ⟩, ⟨ɔʴ⟩, etc.; the retroflex hook ⟨ᶕ⟩, ⟨ᶏ⟩, ⟨ᶒ⟩, ⟨ᶗ⟩, etc.; and added ⟨ɚ⟩ as a variant of ⟨ᶕ⟩ in its 1951 chart. In 1976 the retroflex hook was dropped due to insufficient usage. In 1989, at the Kiel Convention, the hook of ⟨ɚ⟩ and ⟨ɝ⟩ was adopted as a diacritic placed on the right side of the vowel symbol for r-colored vowels, e.g. ⟨ɛ˞o˞ɔ˞⟩. Following the convention of alternating ⟨ɜ⟩ and ⟨ə⟩ for non-rhotic accents, in some English adaptations of IPA, ⟨ɝ⟩ and ⟨ɚ⟩ signify stressed and unstressed, respectively, rather than a difference in phonetic quality. The use of the superscript turned r (əʴ) is still commonly seen.