International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation based

primarily on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic Association as a
standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language.[1] The IPA is used by foreign
language students and teachers, linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, singers, actors,
lexicographers, conlangers and translators.[2][3]
The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are distinctive in spoken
language: phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables.[1] To represent
additional qualities of speech such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft
palate, an extended set of symbols called the Extensions to the IPA is used.[2]
Occasionally symbols are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic
Association. As of 2008, there are 107 distinct letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosody marks
in the IPA proper.

History
In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist
Paul Passy, formed what would come to be known (from 1897 onwards) as the International
Phonetic Association (in French, l’Association phonétique internationale). The original
alphabet was based on a spelling reform for English known as the Romic alphabet, but in
order to make it usable for other languages, the values of the symbols were allowed to vary
from language to language. For example, the sound [ʃ] (the sh in shoe) was originally
represented with the letter ‹c› in English, but with the letter ‹x› in French. However, in 1888,
the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, thus providing the base for all
future revisions.
Since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions
and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the IPA Kiel
Convention in 1989. A minor revision took place in 1993, with the addition of four mid-
central vowels and the removal of symbols for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last
revised in May 2005, with the addition of a symbol for the labiodental flap. Apart from the
addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming
symbols and categories and modifying typefaces.[2]
Extensions of the alphabet are relatively recent; "Extensions to the IPA" was created in 1990
and officially adopted by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association in
1994.

Description
The general principle of the IPA is to provide one symbol for each distinctive sound
(or speech segment). This means that it does not use letter combinations to represent single
sounds, or single letters to represent multiple sounds (the way ‹x› represents [ks] or [ɡz] in
English). There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values (as ‹c› does in
English and other European languages), and finally, 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").
Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 represent consonants and vowels, 31 are
diacritics that are used to further specify these sounds, and 19 are used to indicate such
qualities as length, tone, stress, and intonation.

Letterforms
The symbols chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet.[note 5]
For this reason, most symbols are either Latin or Greek letters, or modifications thereof.
However, there are symbols that are neither: for example, the symbol denoting the glottal
stop, ‹ʔ›, has the form of a "gelded" question mark, and was originally an apostrophe.[note 6] In
fact, there are a few symbols, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, ‹ʕ›, which,
though modified to blend with the Latin alphabet, were inspired by glyphs in other writing
systems (in this case, the Arabic letter ‫ﻉ‬, `ain).
Despite its preference for letters that harmonize with the Latin alphabet, the
International Phonetic Association has occasionally admitted symbols that do not have this
property. For example, before 1989, the IPA symbols for click consonants were ‹ʘ›, ‹ʇ›, ‹ʗ›,
and ‹ʖ›, all of which were derived either from existing symbols, or from Latin and Greek
letters. However, except for ‹ʘ›, none of these symbols was widely used among Khoisanists
or Bantuists, and as a result they were replaced by the more widespread symbols ‹ʘ›, ‹ǀ›, ‹ǃ›,
‹ǂ›, and ‹ǁ› at the IPA Kiel Convention in 1989.
Some of the new symbols were ordinary Roman letters typeset "turned" (= upside-
down) (e.g. ʎ ɥ ə ɔ ɹ ᴚ), which was easily done before mechanical typesetting machines came
into use.

Symbols and sounds

The International Phonetic Alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, using as few non-
Latin forms as possible. The Association created the IPA so that the sound values of most
consonants taken from the Latin alphabet would correspond to "international usage". [4]
Hence, the letters ‹b›, ‹d›, ‹f›, (hard) ‹ɡ›, (non-silent) ‹h›, (unaspirated) ‹k›, ‹l›, ‹m›, ‹n›,
(unaspirated) ‹p›, (voiceless) ‹s›, (unaspirated) ‹t›, ‹v›, ‹w›, and ‹z› have the values used in
English; and the vowels from the Latin alphabet (‹a›, ‹e›, ‹i›, ‹o›, ‹u›) correspond to the sound
values of Latin: [i] is like the vowel in machine, [u] is as in rule, etc. Other letters may differ
from English, but are used with these values in other European languages, such as ‹j›, ‹r›, and
‹y›.
This inventory was extended by using capital or cursive forms, diacritics, and
rotation. There are also several derived or taken from the Greek alphabet, though the sound
values may differ. For example, ‹ʋ› is a vowel in Greek, but an only indirectly related
consonant in the IPA. Two of these (‹θ› and ‹χ›) are used unmodified in form; for others
(including ‹β›, ‹ɣ›, ‹ɛ›, ‹ɸ›, and ‹ʋ›) subtly different glyph shapes have been devised, which
may be encoded in Unicode separately from their "parent" letters.
The sound values of modified Latin letters can often be derived from those of the
original letters.[12] For example, letters with a rightward-facing hook at the bottom represent
retroflex consonants; and small capital letters usually represent uvular consonants. Apart
from the fact that certain kinds of modification to the shape of a letter generally correspond to
certain kinds of modification to the sound represented, there is no way to deduce the sound
represented by a symbol from the shape of the symbol (unlike, for example, in Visible
Speech).
Beyond the letters themselves, there are a variety of secondary symbols which aid in
transcription. Diacritic marks can be combined with IPA letters to transcribe modified
phonetic values or secondary articulations. There are also special symbols for suprasegmental
features such as stress and tone that are often employed.

Brackets and phonemes

There are two principal types of brackets used to set off IPA transcriptions:
 [square brackets] are used for phonetic details of the pronunciation, possibly including
details that may not be used for distinguishing words in the language being
transcribed, but which the author nonetheless wishes to document.
 /slashes/ are used to mark off phonemes, all of which are distinctive in the language,
without any extraneous detail.
For example, while the /p/ sounds of pin and spin are pronounced slightly differently in
English (and this difference would be meaningful in some languages), it is not meaningful in
English. Thus phonemically the words are /pɪn/ and /spɪn/, with the same /p/ phoneme.
However, to capture the difference between them (the allophones of /p/), they can be
transcribed phonetically as [pʰɪn] and [spɪn].

Two other conventions are less commonly seen:

 Double slashes, //...//, pipes, |...|, double pipes, ||...||, or braces, {...}, may be used
around a word to denote its underlying structure, more abstract even than that of
phonemes. See morphophonology for examples.
 Angle brackets are used to clarify that the letters represent the original orthography of
the language, or sometimes an exact transliteration of a non-Latin script, not the IPA;
or, within the IPA, that the letters themselves are indicated, not the sound values that
they carry. For example, ‹pin› and ‹spin› would be seen for those words, which do not
contain the ee sound [i] of the IPA letter ‹i›. Italics are perhaps more commonly used
for this purpose when full words are being written (as pin, spin above), but this
convention may not be considered sufficiently clear for individual letters and
digraphs. The true angle brackets, ⟨...⟩ (U+27E8, U+29E9), are not supported by
many non-mathematical fonts as of 2010. Therefore chevrons, ‹...› (U+2039,
U+203A), are sometimes used in substitution, as are the less-than and greater-than
signs, <...> (U+003C, U+003E).

Usage

Ébauche is a French term meaning outline or blank.

Although the IPA offers over a hundred symbols for transcribing speech, it is not
necessary to use all relevant symbols at the same time; it is possible to transcribe speech with
various levels of precision. A precise phonetic transcription, in which sounds are described in
a great deal of detail, is known as a narrow transcription. A coarser transcription which
ignores some of this detail is called a broad transcription. Both are relative terms, and both
are generally enclosed in square brackets. [1] 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.
Phonetic transcriptions of the word international in two English dialects. The square brackets
indicate that the differences between these dialects are not necessarily sufficient to
distinguish different words in English.
For example, the English word little may be transcribed broadly using the IPA as
[ˈlɪtəl], and this broad (imprecise) transcription is an accurate (approximately correct)
description of many pronunciations. A more narrow transcription may focus on individual or
dialectical details: [ˈɫɪɾɫ] in General American, [ˈlɪʔo] in Cockney, or [ˈɫɪːɫ] in Southern US
English.
is customary to use simpler letters, without a lot of diacritics, in phonemic
transcriptions. The choice of IPA letters may reflect the theoretical claims of the author, or
merely be a convenience for typesetting. For instance, in English, either the vowel of pick or
the vowel of peak may be transcribed as /i/ (for the pairs /pik, piːk/ or /pɪk, pik/), and neither
is identical to the vowel of the French word pique which is also generally transcribed /i/. That
is, letters between slashes do not have absolute values, something true of broader phonetic
approximations as well. A narrow transcription may, however, be used to distinguish them:
[pʰɪk], [pʰiːk], [pik].