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International Phonetic Alphabet
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	1888 to the present
Languages	Reserved for special use in any language
Related scripts
Parent systems	Romic Alphabet Phonotypic Alphabet International Phonetic Alphabet
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between , / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

“IPA” redirects here. For other uses, see IPA (disambiguation). The NATO phonetic alphabet, which is different, has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For a brief description of IPA symbols used for English, see IPA chart for English.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists. It is intended to provide a standardized, accurate and unique way of representing the sounds of any spoken language, and is used, often on a day-to-day basis, by phoneticians, dialectologists, and other linguists; speech scientists and speech therapists; foreign language teachers; lexicographers; and translators. In its unextended form (as of 2005) it has approximately 107 base symbols and 55 modifiers.

Although the IPA is meant to represent only those qualities of speech that are relevant to language itself (such as tongue position, manner of articulation, and the separation and accentuation of words and syllables), an extended set of symbols has been created by phonologists to record qualities of speech that have no effect on meaning (such as creakiness of voice, lisping, and sounds made by people with a cleft).. These symbols are not part of the IPA itself, and hence will not be discussed in this article.

For a treatment of the English language using the IPA, see International Phonetic Alphabet for English. For links to pages describing the pronunciation of various IPA symbols, see the relevant section.

History

The development of the IPA dates back to 1886, when a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would come to be known as the International Phonetic Association (also abbreviated IPA). Two years after its formation, the International Phonetic Association released the first official version of the IPA, which was based upon the Romic alphabet of Henry Sweet, which in turn was formed from the Phonotypic Alphabet of Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis. Since its creation, the organization of vowels and consonants has largely remained the same, with the consonants always being grouped by place of articulation, and the vowels being grouped by tongue position.

Description

The general principle of the IPA is to provide a separate symbol for each speech segment, avoiding letter combinations (such as sh and th in English), redundancy (having symbols for two sounds when all known languages treat them as one and the same), ambiguity (such as that of c in English), and letters that clash with the Latin alphabet (such as ℜ).

Selectiveness

The IPA is an example of what is known to linguists as a “selective” phonetic alphabet. This means that it does not have separate symbols for two sounds if there does not exist a language in which these two sounds are contrasted with one another. In other words, it aims to provide a separate symbol for every contrastive (or phonemic) sound occurring in human language.

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 symbols. Instead, it provides a single symbol (in this case, ) for both sounds.

Letterforms

The symbols chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. For this reason, most symbols are either Latin or Greek letters, or modifications thereof. However, there are symbols that are neither: for example, the glottal stop has the form of a “gelded” question mark, and was originally an apostrophe. Indeed, some symbols, such as the pharyngeal fricative , though modified to look more Latin, were inspired by glyphs in other writing systems (in this case, the Arabic letter Template:Ar, `ain).

Despite its preference for letters that harmonize with the Latin alphabet, the International Phonetic Association has occasionally admitted symbols that seem to have nothing to do with Roman letters. For example, prior to 1989, the IPA symbols for click consonants were , , , and , none of which look terribly out of place among Latin letters. However, except for , none of these symbols was reflective of contemporary practice among Khoisanists (who use symbols for click consonants the most frequently). Hence, at the 1989 convention of the International Phonetic Association in Kiel, they were replaced by the more iconic symbols , , , , and .

Symbols and sounds

The sound-values of most consonants taken from the Latin alphabet correspond roughly to those of French, and are also close to those of most other European languages (including English): these consonants are , , , (hard) , , , , , , (unvoiced) , , , and . The other consonants from the Latin alphabet, , , , , , , , and , correspond to the sounds these letters represent in various other languages:

IPA	pronounced as
	<c> in Malay IAST c
	initial <h> in English
	<j> in Slavic and most Germanic languages
	in Quechua;
	<rr> and initial <r> in Spanish and Italian;
	initial <w> in English
	intervocalic <x> in modern Spanish and <х> in Russian;
	<y> in German <y> in Old English and the Scandinavian languages <Υ> (upsilon) in Ancient Greek;

The vowels from the Latin alphabet (, , , , ) correspond to the vowels of Spanish and are similar to those of Italian. is like the vowel in piece, is as in rule, etc.

Symbols derived from the Greek alphabet include , , , , , , and . Of these, the only ones that closely correspond to the Greek letters they are derived from are and . , , , and denote beta-like, epsilon-like, phi-like, and chi-like sounds, but do not correspond to them exactly. represents a u-like sound, but is otherwise fairly distant from the original Greek letter <υ>, upsilon.

Letters that share a particular modification sometimes correspond to a similar type of sound. For example, all the retroflex consonants have the same symbol as the corresponding alveolar consonants, with the addition of a rightward facing hook at the bottom (e.g., for , for , etc.) Nevertheless, it is usually not possible to deduce the features of a sound (tongue position, manner of articulation, etc.) from the shape of its IPA symbol. For instance, there is no consistent relationship between lowercase letters and their small capital counterparts, nor are all labial consonants linked through a common design.

Usage

Although at first the IPA may seem too precise to offer much choice in how to transcribe speech, there is in fact a variety of ways to do so. At one end of the spectrum is narrow transcription, in which every feature of every sound is specified, down to the dialect and speech habits of the individual speaker. At the other end of the spectrum is broad transcription, which attempts to provide just enough description of the sounds to allow for variations among different speakers’ pronunciation of the same word. In either case, the transcription is generally enclosed in brackets.

Use in dictionaries

Most British English dictionaries now use the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the pronunciation of words. However some British, and most American volumes use a system that may be more intuitive for readers unfamiliar with the IPA. For example, the pronunciation-representation systems in most U.S. dictionaries use “y” for IPA and “sh” for IPA , reflecting the most-common representations of those sounds in written English. (In IPA, would represent the sound of the German ü, and would represent the sound in it’s her.)

A major drawback of the systems used in American dictionaries is their failure to properly represent sounds not in the English language, such as and . In addition, several American dictionary publishers have their own systems for representing pronunciation, so there is little consistency among the systems used by different dictionaries.

The IPA is also not universal among dictionaries in other countries and languages. Mass-market Czech multilingual dictionaries, for instance, tend to use the IPA only for sounds not found in the Czech language, due to the current incapability of rendering ř in the IPA correctly.

Educational Initiative

There is some interest in using native speakers to produce sound and video files of sufficient breadth to completely demonstrate all the speech sounds covered by the IPA. Such a project would encompass a large subset of the world's languages. The rationales for such projects are varied including:

1. Linguistic and anthropologic research
2. Development of a reference standard or Rosetta Stone (as such) in order to preserve intact examples of the sounds of human language
3. Development of resources to prepare students and especially very young children (ages 6-36 months) for universal language acquisition through familiarization and subsequent imitation of the breadth of human speech sounds.

Letters

The International Phonetic Alphabet divides its symbols into three categories: pulmonic consonants, non-pulmonic consonants, and vowels.

Consonants (pulmonic)

A pulmonic consonant is a consonant made by obstructing the glottis or oral cavity 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 the English language are pulmonic, as are all consonants in Indo-European languages.

The pulmonic consonant table, which includes most consonants, is arranged in rows that designate manner of articulation and columns that designate place of articulation. The main chart includes only consonants with a single place of articulation.

Notes:

• Asterisks (*) mark reported sounds that do not (yet) have official IPA symbols. See the articles for ad hoc symbols found in the literature.
• Daggers (†) mark IPA symbols that do not yet have official Unicode support. Since May 2005, this is the case of the labiodental flap, symbolized by a right-hook v: . In the meantime the similarly shaped izhitsa (ѵ) is used here.
• In rows where some symbols appear in pairs (the obstruents), the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant (except breathy-voiced ). However, cannot be voiced. In the other rows (the sonorants), the single symbol represents a voiced consonant.
• Although there is a single symbol for the coronal places of articulation for all consonants but fricatives, when dealing with a particular language, the symbols are treated as specifically alveolar, post-alveolar, etc., as appropriate for that language.
• Shaded areas indicate articulations judged to be impossible.
• The symbols represent either voiced fricatives or approximants.
• It is primarily the shape of the tongue rather than its position that distinguishes the fricatives , , and .
• The labiodental nasal is not known to exist as a phoneme in any language.

Coarticulation

Coarticulated consonants are sounds in which two individual consonants are pronounced at the same time. In English, the in “went” is a coarticulated consonant, as the lips are rounded while the back of the tongue is raised simultaneously. Other languages, such as French and Swedish, have different coarticulated consonants.

Notes:

• is described as a “simultaneous and ”. However, this analysis is disputed. See the article for discussion.

Consonants (non-pulmonic)

Non-pulmonic consonants are sounds which are made without the lungs. These include clicks (found in the Khoisan languages of Africa) and implosives (found in languages such as Swahili).

View this table as an image

Notes:

• All clicks are doubly articulated and require two symbols: a velar or uvular stop, plus a symbol for the anterior release: etc., or . When the dorsal articulation is omitted, a may usually be assumed.
• Symbols for the voiceless implosives are no longer supported by the IPA, though they remain in Unicode. Instead, the IPA uses the voiced equivalent with a voiceless diacritic: , etc.
• Although not confirmed from any language, and therefore not "explicitly recognized" by the IPA, a retroflex implosive, , is supported in the Unicode Phonetic Extensions Supplement, added in version 4.1 of the Unicode Standard, or can be created as a composite .
• The ejective symbol is often seen for glottalized but pulmonic sonorants, such as , , , , but these are more properly transcribed as creaky (, , , ).

Vowels

View the vowel chart as an image

IPA: Vowels
Front Central Back Close i y ɨ ʉ ɯ u Near-close ɪ ʏ ʊ Close-mid e ø ɘ ɵ ɤ o Mid e̞ ø̞ ə ɤ̞ o̞ Open-mid ɛ œ ɜ ɞ ʌ ɔ Near-open æ ɐ Open a ɶ ä ɑ ɒ
IPA help  audio full chart template Legend: unrounded • rounded

Notes:

• Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel, as does (at least prototypically). All others are unrounded.
• is not confirmed as a distinct phoneme in any language.
• is officially a front vowel, but there is little distinction between front and central open vowels, and is frequently used for an open central vowel.

Affricates and double articulation

Affricates and doubly articulated stops are represented by two symbols joined by a tie bar, either above or below the symbols. The six most common affricates are optionally represented by ligatures, though this is no longer official IPA usage, due to the great number of ligatures that would be required to represent all affricates this way. A third affricate transcription sometimes seen uses the superscript notation for a consonant release, for example tˢ for t​͡s, paralleling kˣ ~ k͡x. The symbols for the palatal plosives, <c ɟ>, are often used as a convenience for or similar affricates, even in official IPA publications, so they must be interpreted with care.

View this table as an image.

Note:

• If your browser uses Arial Unicode MS to display IPA characters, the following incorrectly formed sequences may look better due to a bug in that font: ts͡, tʃ͡, tɕ͡, dz͡, dʒ͡, dʑ͡, tɬ͡, kp͡, ɡb͡, ŋm͡.

Diacritics

Diacritics are small markings which are placed around the IPA letter in order to show a certain alteration in the letter's pronunciation. Sub-diacritics (markings normally placed below a letter or symbol) may be placed above a symbol with a descender (informally called a tail), i.e. ŋ̊.

The dotless i, <ı>, is used when the dot would interfere with the diacritic. Other IPA symbols may appear as diacritics to represent phonetic detail: tˢ (fricative release), bʱ (breathy voice), ˀa (glottal onset), ᵊ (epenthetic schwa), o (diphthongization). More advanced diacritcs were developed in the Extended IPA for more specific pronunciation encoding.

View the diacritic table as an image

Notes:

1. Some linguists restrict this breathy-voice diacritic to sonorants, and transcribe obstruents as bʱ.
2. With aspirated voiced consonants, the aspiration is also voiced. Many linguists prefer one of the diacritics dedicated to breathy voice.

The state of the glottis can be finely transcribed with diacritics. A series of alveolar plosives ranging from an open to a closed glottis phonation are:

Suprasegmentals

These symbols describe the suprasegmental features of a language, collectively known as a language's prosody. These symbols show the length, stress, pitch, and rhythym of a language. Many sumprasegmentals are often reserved for very specific transcriptions intended to convey the differences in speech between individuals or dialects.

• View this table as an image

Intonation

Tone

IPA allows for the use of either tone diacritics or tone letters to indicate tones. These are used in tonal languages such as Chinese.

Unicode and tonal symbols

With regard to tone diacritics, Unicode encodes marks for some contour tones, but not all. In Unicode version 4.1, only hacek (rising) and circumflex (falling) diacritics were encoded. Subsequent versions may also include six additional diacritics for contour tones, such as the macron-acute and the grave-acute-grave ligatures. (See an image here.) Note that contour tone diacritics are not encoded as sequences of level tone diacritics in Unicode.

With tone letters, Unicode does not have separate encodings for contour tones. Instead, sequences of level tone letters are used, with proper display dependent on the font, usually by means of OpenType font rendition: or . (These are probably not displaying correctly in your browser. See the image for a sample of how they should appear.) Since few fonts support combination tone letters (see the external links for one that is free), a common solution is to use the old system of superscript numerals from '1' to '5', for example . However, this depends on local linguistic tradition, with '5' generally being high and '1' being low for Asian languages, but '1' being high and '5' low for African languages. An old IPA convention sometimes still seen is to use sub-diacritics for low contour tones: for low-falling and low-rising.

The upstep and downstep modifiers are superscript arrows. Unicode version 4.1 does not encode these, though subsequent versions will. The arrows for upstep and downstep should not be confused with the full-height arrows, which are used to indicate airflow direction.

Obsolete symbols, nonstandard symbols, and capital variants

The IPA inherited alternate symbols from various traditions, but eventually settled on one for each sound. The other symbols are now considered obsolete. An example is ɷ which has been standardised to ʊ. Several symbols indicating secondary articulation have been dropped altogether, with the idea that such things should be indicated with diacritics: ƍ for zʷ is one. In addition, the rare voiceless implosive series ƥ ƭ ƈ ƙ ʠ has been dropped.

There are also unsupported symbols from local traditions that find their way into publications that otherwise use the standard IPA. This is especially common with affricates such as ƛ (the "tl" in "Nahuatl"). These symbols are often called ad hoc symbols by linguists, as they are created only after (ad hoc) an example of the sound is found.

While the IPA does not itself have a set of capital letters, languages have adopted symbols from the IPA as part of their orthographies, and in such cases they have invented capital variants of these. This is especially common in Africa. An example is Kabye of northern Togo, which has Ɔ Ɛ Ŋ Ɣ Ʃ (capital ʃ). Other pseudo-IPA capitals supported by unicode are Ɓ/Ƃ Ƈ Ɗ/Ƌ Ə/Ǝ Ɠ Ħ Ɯ Ɲ Ɵ Ʈ Ʊ Ʋ Ʒ.

Extended IPA

The Extended IPA is a new group of symbols for the IPA whose original purpose was to accurately transcribe disordered speech. However, linguists have used it to designate a number of unique sounds within standard communication, such as hushing, gnashing teeth, and smacking lips.

The Extended IPA has also been used to record certain peculiarities in an individual's voice, such as whispers, nasalized voicing, and whispering.

Sounds that have no symbols in the IPA

The remaining blank cells on the IPA chart can be filled without too much difficulty if the need arises. Some ad hoc symbols have appeared in the literature, for example for the lateral flaps and voiceless lateral fricatives, the epiglottal trill, and the labiodental plosives. Diacritics can supply much of the remainder, which would indeed be appropriate if the sounds were allophones. For example, the Spanish bilabial approximant is commonly written as a lowered fricative, . Similarly, voiced lateral fricatives would be written as raised lateral approximants, . 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 symbol and the advanced diacritic, . Similarly, a labiodental trill would be written (bilabial trill and the dental sign). Palatal and uvular taps, if they exist, and the epiglottal tap could be written as extra-short plosives, . A retroflex trill can be written as a retracted , just as retroflex fricatives sometimes are. The remaining consonants, the uvular laterals 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.

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 . True mid vowels are lowered , while centered and are near-close and open central vowels, respectively. The vowels that aren't representable in this scheme are the compressed vowels, which would require a dedicated diacritic.

Symbol names

It is often desirable to distinguish an IPA symbol from the sound it is intended to represent, since there is not a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound in broad transcription. The symbol's names and phonetic descriptions are described in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. The symbols also have nonce names in the Unicode standard. In some cases, the Unicode names and the IPA names do not agree. For example, IPA calls ɛ "epsilon", but Unicode calls it "small letter open E".

The traditional names of the Latin and Greek letters are used for unmodified symbols. In Unicode, some of the symbols of Greek origin have Latin forms for use in IPA; the others use the symbols from the Greek section.

For diacritics, there are two methods of naming. For traditional diacritics, the IPA uses the name of the symbol from a certain language, for example, é is acute, based on the name of the symbol in English and French. In non-traditional diacritics, the IPA often names a symbol according to an object it resembles, as d̪ is called bridge.

Other phonetic notation

The IPA is not the only phonetic transcription system in use. The other common Latin-based system is the Americanist phonetic notation, devised for representing American languages, but used by some US linguists as an alternative to the IPA. There are also sets of symbols specific to Slavic, Indic, Finno-Ugric, and Caucasian linguistics, as well as other regional specialties. The differences between these alphabets and IPA are relatively small, although often the special characters of the IPA are abandoned in favour of diacritics or digraphs.

Other alphabets, such as Hangul, may have their own phonetic extensions. There also exist featural phonetic transcription systems, such as Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech and its derivatives.

There is an extended version of the IPA for disordered speech (extIPA), and another set of symbols used for voice quality (VoQS). There are also many personal or idiosyncratic extensions, such as Luciano Canepari's IPA.

Since the IPA uses symbols that are outside the ASCII character set, several systems have been developed that map the IPA symbols to ASCII characters. Notable systems include Kirshenbaum, SAMPA, and X-SAMPA. The usage of mapping systems has been declining because of spreading support for Unicode.

See also

• International Phonetic Alphabet for English explains those IPA symbols used to represent the phonemes of English.
• International Phonetic Alphabet for Dutch explains those IPA symbols used to represent the phonemes of Dutch.
• IPA chart for English: simplified version.
• Pronunciation respelling for English: overview of several pronunciation guide systems used in English dictionaries.
• TIPA provides IPA support for LaTeX.
• SAMPA, X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum are other methods of mapping IPA designations into ASCII.
• List of phonetics topics
• Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA)
• Unicode Phonetic Symbols

References

• Ball, Martin J.; Esling, John H.; & Dickson, B. Craig. (1995). The VoQS system for the transcription of voice quality. Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet, 25 (2), 71-80.
• Canepari, Luciano. (2005a). "A Handbook of Phonetics: ‹Natural› Phonetics." München: Lincom Europa, pp. 518. ISBN 3-8958-480-3 (hb).
• Canepari, Luciano. (2005b) "A Handbook of Pronunciation: English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Esperanto." München: Lincom Europa, pp. 436. ISBN 3-89586-481-1 (hb).
• Duckworth, M.; Allen, G.; Hardcastle, W.; & Ball, M. J. (1990). Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for the transcription of atypical speech. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 4, 273-280.
• Hill, Kenneth C. (1988). . Language, 64 (1), 143-144.
• International Phonetic Association. (1989). Report on the 1989 Kiel convention. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 19 (2), 67-80.
• Jones, Daniel. (1989). English pronouncing dictionary (14 ed.). London: Dent.
• Ladefoged, Peter. (1990). The revised International Phonetic Alphabet. Language, 66 (3), 550-552.
• Ladefoged, Peter; & Halle, Morris. (1988). Some major features of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Language, 64 (3), 577-582.
• Pullum, Geoffrey K.; & Laduslaw, William A. (1986). Phonetic symbol guide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-68532-2.

Notes

1. Cite error: The named reference world was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

External links

General

• Official home page of the IPA
• Learning the IPA for English
• French IPA characters
• Information on IPA by Omniglot

Free IPA font downloads

• Gentium, a professionally designed international font (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic) in roman and italic typefaces that includes the IPA, but not yet tone letters or the new labiodental flap.
• Charis SIL, a very complete international font (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic) in roman, italic, and bold typefaces that includes tone letters and pre-composed tone diacritics on IPA vowels, the new labiodental flap, and many non-standard phonetic symbols. Based on Bitstream Charter, this font suffers from extremely bad hinting when rendered by Freetype on Linux.
• Doulos SIL, a Times/Times New Roman style font. It contains the same characters as Charis SIL, but only in a single face, roman.
• SIL93 the legacy SIL IPA93 fonts (Manuscript and Sophia) recoded in Unicode.
• DejaVu fonts, an open source font family derived from the Bitstream Vera fonts.
• TIPA, a font and system for entering IPA phonetic transcriptions in LaTeX documents.

Keyboards

• Online keyboard
• Online keyboard and machine pronunciation
• Downloadable IPA-SIL keyboard layout for Mac OS X for Unicode IPA input
• Downloadable IPA keyboard layout for Microsoft Windows for Unicode IPA input
• WikiTeX supports editing IPA sequences directly in Wiki articles.

Sound files

• Peter Ladefoged's Course in Phonetics (with sound files)
  • Pronounceable IPA chart
• An introduction to the sounds of languages
• IPA Lab Chart with sound files at University of Victoria. (Works with QuickTime.)
• Flash version of IPA charts, with sound samples
• Another set of IPA sound samples

Charts

• IPA chart source
• IPA Chart in Unicode and XHTML/CSS
• IPA number chart, at University of Victoria.

Unicode

• Unicode chart for main IPA letters
• Unicode chart for IPA modifier letters
• Unicode chart including IPA diacritics
• International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode
• Unicode-HTML codes for IPA symbols: Tables of symbol names and HTML codes at PennState.

Personal extensions of the IPA

• IPA : Luciano Canepari's system (500 base symbols)

Technical note

Most IPA symbols are not included in Times New Roman, the default font for Latin scripts in Internet Explorer for Windows. To properly view IPA symbols in Internet Explorer for Windows, you must change your browser font to another font which includes the IPA extensions characters, such as to Lucida Sans Unicode font, which comes with Windows XP; Gentium, Charis (SIL), Doulos (SIL), DejaVu Sans, or TITUS Cyberbit, which are freely available; or Arial Unicode MS, which comes with Microsoft Office. Alternatively, the style sheet could try using unicode-range specifications to note the gaps where Times font does not have glyphs for IPA, for example, Hawaiian ‘okina (glottal stop), etc. and thus hopefully force the browser to check further down the list of fonts.

On this page, we have forced the browser to use such a font, so it should appear correctly, but this hasn't yet been done to all the other pages containing IPA. This also applies to other pages using special symbols. Bear this in mind if you see error symbols such as "蚟" in articles.

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