phonetic symbols

History
Main article: History of the IPA

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).[4] 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.[5] 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.[4] However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, thus providing the base for all future revisions.[4][6]

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[2] and the removal of symbols for voiceless implosives.[7] The alphabet was last revised in May 2005, with the addition of a symbol for the labiodental flap.[8] 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.[9]


Description
A chart of the full International Phonetic Alphabet.
For a guide to pronouncing IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English dialects.

The general principle of the IPA is to provide one symbol for each distinctive sound (or speech segment).[10] This means that it does not use letter combinations to represent single sounds,[note 2] 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"[2]).[note 3]

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.[note 4]


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).[7]

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.[11]


Symbols and sounds

The International Phonetic Alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, using as few non-Latin forms as possible.[4] 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.
[edit] 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 ({ }) around a word may be used 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 may not be considered sufficiently clear for individual letters and digraphs. ⟨ ⟩ (U+27E8, U+29E9) are probably ideal for angle brackets, but they are not yet supported by many fonts as of 2009. Angle quotation marks ‹ › (U+2039, U+203A) therefore may be used instead, as in the above examples. Less-than and greater-than signs < > (U+003C, U+003E) are also used in substitution for angle brackets.


Usage
Further information: Phonetic transcription
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: [ˈlɪɾɫ] in General American, [ˈlɪʔo] in Cockney, or [ˈlɪːɫ] in Southern US English.

It 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].