The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use anormal pronunciation key?
The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/orEFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound ofy in "yes" is spelled/j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this soundj.
For English words, Wikipediadoes use a "normal" pronunciation key. It isHelp:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be usedin addition to the IPA, enclosed in the{{respell}} template. See the opening sentences ofBeijing,Cochineal, andLepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example,cum laude would be respelledkuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread askoom-LOH-day.English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it.
Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. SeeWikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion.
The IPA should be specific to a particular national standard, and the national pronunciations should be listed separately.
Listing multiple national pronunciations after every Wikipedia entry word quickly becomes unwieldy, and listing only one leads to accusations of bias. Therefore, we use a system that aims at being pan-dialectal. Of course, if a particular dialect or local pronunciation is relevant to the topic, it may be listed in addition to the wider pronunciation, using{{IPA|und|...}} or{{IPA|en|...|generic=yes}}.
The use of/r/ for the rhotic consonant is inaccurate. It should be/ɹ/ instead.
The English rhotic ispronounced in a wide variety of ways in accents of English around the world, and the goal of our diaphonemic system is to cover as many of them as possible. Moreover, where there is no phonological contrast to possibly cause confusion, using a more typographically recognizable letter for a sound represented by another symbol in the narrow IPA is totally within the confines of the IPA's principles (IPA Handbook, pp. 27–28). In fact,/r/ is arguably the more traditional IPA notation; not only is it used by most if not all dictionaries, but also inLe Maître Phonétique, the predecessor to theJournal of the IPA, which was written entirely in phonetic transcription, ⟨r⟩ was the norm for the English rhotic.
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We should use different IPA symbol for english: English after RP
I would like to bring the issue about the current use of the IPA symbol for english. It've been demonstrated by Linguist like Geoff Lindsey (from University College London) that the current IPA symbols choosen to represent english phonems are wrong in many ways. Like for exemble the phoneme /iː/ which is not at all pronunced like a long /i/ but like /ij/ in southern brittish english. Or another examble is the vowel in "boat" depicted by the symbol /eʊ/ unlike the real used pronunciation which is /ow/
The book "English after RP" explains all of that in great details, and for a free alternative, I don't know I it's allowed to post youtube link so I don't do it but I invite anyone interested to chek the youtube channel of Geoff Lindsey, there's videos about this exact topic.
Furthermore there is the CUBE dictionnary (CUBE = current brittish english) that act as a good source using a modern proper set of IPA symbols to better discribe the way english is pronounced.Malekpe (talk)23:10, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I assume that Malekpe meant the explanations of the RP correspondences of the diaphonemic signs on this page, not the actual diaphonemic system that Wikipedia uses - so what he was talking about is, indeed, restricted to RP. If he did mean the diaphonemic system, his remark was misguided not because 'English is not restricted to RP' but because that system isn't really an attempt to reflect adequately the phonetic realisation of any dialect. That said, this confusion only goes to show that the current diaphonemic system is misleading, since it looks like a phonetic transcription of an existing dialect, but is actually a set of abstract symbols that are meant to reflect all dialects simultaneously, regardless of the actual realisation. Wikipedia should adoptenPR like Wiktionary, because it does not create the misleading impression of an attempt at phonetic accuracy for those of us who do understand IPA.--Anonymous44 (talk)23:17, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No, slashes don't stand for diaphonemic transcription. They stand forphonemic transcription. That is not at all the same thing. Next, the very choice of using a phonemic transcription is debatable - unlike (broad) phonetic realisation, which is undeniable, it is a highly theoretical and debatable question what it is phonemic, underlying etc. The difference between phonemic form and phonetic realisation is often large and many non-native speakers would fail to figure out the difference and apply it. Finally, it is a reasonable assumption that most of our readers 'don't understand IPA', and, more importantly, that the ones who do tend to be non-native speakers who have been taught using IPA, where it was used in a broadphonetic transcription - and enIPA looks sufficiently similar to that very transcription to cause confusion. --Anonymous44 (talk)11:55, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Finally, it is a reasonable assumption that most of our readers 'don't understand IPA': Isn't that what this help page isfor? Also, I guarantee you that practically no reader understands the CUBE system, almost certainly never having heard of it or come across it. In addition, doesn't it amount to telling everybody that doesn't speak a certain variety of England English that they're on their own? That's the problem that phonemic transcription attempts to alleviate. (I found it described in a YouTube video athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tcrv8lgLbk. The dictionary athttps://cubedictionary.org/ isn't responding. Or, rather, it doesn't accept modern https: secure communication, and using old http:, it redirects to a website with an .hu domain suffix that doesn't respond.)
Maybe how CUBE would be useful here is explained in the longer video. You can certainly post a link to a YouTube video in a talk page for discussion purposes! Is it the one athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OULnCCvdk8? If not, where is it? Might you please tell uswhere in the video the relevant portion is so we don't need to sit through the entire hour-plus of it to see what you have in mind?Largoplazo (talk)13:43, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It still doesn't make our transcription of the vowels problematic unless we delve into phonemic mergers, or distinctions not covered in the guide. On the other hand, transcriptions like/nɔːrθ/ are problematic with single slashes as they suggest that the/r/ is there on the phonemic level also in non-rhotic dialects, which is not the case at all. I've heard non-rhotic Brits and Australians slip up and say things like[θɔɾt] for 'thought' when attempting a Russian or Scottish accent, countless times. The/r/ is long gone and so I'd support the switch to double slashes, also because the same applies to/hw/.
While I agree that Lindsey's system is vastly more accuratefor SSB (though some changes apply cross-dialectally, e.g.FLEECE is almost universally a diphthong), it has the same problem as the reformed orthography for Australian English: ⟨ɔ⟩ is very likely to be misinterpreted asTHOUGHT. The other problem is that almost nobody uses it and that probably won't change in the foreseeable future.Sol505000 (talk)19:42, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The fatal flaw with transcribing a specific accent is that soon there will be accusations of discrimination because we don't includemy accent, and soon there will be half a dozen or more pronunciations for every entry, inconsistent and contradictory like the ridiculous system they use on Wiktionary. Because this is not a dictionary, there's a high likelihood that we'll end up banning pronunciations altogether, just as we banned Indian names and scripts (the only country so discriminated against on WP) due to the endless edit-wars that including them produced.
If you want to use double slashes or back slashes to mark our transcription as diaphonemic, I would support you, but it needs to remain diaphonemic.— kwami (talk)20:14, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My point is that someone who understands IPA by definition does not expect "phonetic accuracy" in transcriptions enclosed in slashes.Nardog (talk)13:54, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
enPR is an american convention that's not readily accepted by the rest of the world. that said, i wouldn't be opposed to using it alongside the IPA instead of the current respelling system, which doesn't work for all words.
double slashes for the IPA have also been proposed, and would be more accurate, but it's been objected that anyone who needs that cue isn't likely to understand IPA anyway. i don't know how true that would turn out to be.— kwami (talk)03:10, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
enPR andRespell are highly misleading to many outside of the US and most people outside of the Anglosphere. While non-native speakers should not be given priority over natives, there are many non-native users, and it is they who are more likely to need a pronunciation guide. These respellings can supplement IPA, but it should not replace it. —AjaxSmack15:34, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Everyone can look up what the symbols of enPR and Respell stand for by opening this page. And such looking up is inevitable, because there is no transcription system that can be guaranteed to be understood by a lay native or non-native speaker in advance. EnPR and respell are based on the way English letters are usually pronounced, which any non-native reading English Wikipedia will already be familiar with to a great extent, so they have a good start. For non-native speakers who haven't been taught using IPA, it is, if anything, likely to be harder to understand than enPR. For those whohave been taught using IPA, Wikipedia's diaphonemic system is misleading, because they are used to interpreting IPA as a broad phonetic transcription, not as a phonemic one. I.e. they may well try to pronounce the words as if this were a phonetic transcription.--Anonymous44 (talk)11:55, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Like for exemble the phoneme /iː/ which is not at all pronunced like a long /i/ but like /ij/ in southern brittish english. Or another examble is the vowel in "boat" depicted by the symbol /eʊ/ unlike the real used pronunciation which is /ow/. That's the whole point. We can't write aphonetic representation that covers the English spoken by more than the speakers of one variety of English. Written with correct notation, your statement would have been "Like for exemble the phoneme /iː/ which is not at all pronunced like a long [i] but like [ij] in southern brittish english. Or another examble is the vowel in "boat" depicted by the symbol /eʊ/ unlike the real used pronunciation which is [ow]." Symbols within square brackets represent the sounds that a given speaker actually produces. Symbols between slashes representphonemes, abstract constructs put together to create a model for the actual diversity of pronunciation systems followed by speakers. So, for example, the first sound in "thin" is treated abstractly as a phoneme /θ/ that, for most English speakers, corresponds to the actual pronunciation [θ] while, for some, in some positions in a word, it's [t] or [tʰ] or [f] instead. The symbol chosen for a given phoneme is, to some extent, arbitrary. It's going to be chosen to besuggestive of the actual sound it typically corresponds to. But it isn't necessarily the actual pronunciation of any given speaker.
The alternative to this phonemic representation would be for Wikipedia to represent the actual pronunciation of a very small community of people that would then be useless to speakers from anywhere else. I think that that's whatyou thought was happening here, that only the speech of a small subset of the English-speaking world was being represented, but the phonemic representations cover much more of the English-speaking world. To translate that phonemic representation into the speech of a given variety of English, you just have to know how the speakers of that variety produces each of the phonemes when they speak.Largoplazo (talk)16:23, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The "r" sound in English is not /r/ (voiced alveolar trill), but rather /ɹ̠/, the voiced postalveolar approximant, or often for convenience generalised as /ɹ/, the voiced alveolar approximant. The voiced alveolar trill was used in older dialects of English, like high RP, but is now very far from the norm, only really appearing in Scottish dialects, and seems misplaced to list it here? I get this is explained in the footnote but it feels misinformative to generalise quite different consonants purely for the sake of convenience, as that seems to contradict the purpose of the IPA?Natejb2003 (talk)12:26, 29 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The linked text does not claim what you say - it only says distinguishing between phonemes is one of the purposes of the IPA, notthe primary one - and in any case using broad transcription and sticking to standard letters of the Latin alphabet at the expense of phonetic accuracy is not 'phonemic analysis'. The real reason why using /r/ is acceptable is because the whole system used by Wikipedia is diaphonemic and abstract, i.e. it is not really meant to express the specific phonetic realisation of any given dialect of English, but to signal them all simultaneously. Which only goes to show, just like the previous thread, that the use of IPA for a diaphonemic transcription leads to misunderstandings. The proposals for changes are due to people not understanding that the system is diaphonemic, and the people objecting to the proposals obviously keep forgetting that fact just as the OPs do. Therefore, as I wrote above, Wikipedia should useenPR, as Wiktionary does, or something similar - a system that does not mislead readers by looking like a phonetic transcription.--Anonymous44 (talk)23:37, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It saysFrom its earliest days (see appendix 4) the International Phonetic Association has aimed to provide 'a separate sign for each distinctive sound; that is, for each sound which, being used instead of another, in the same language, can change the meaning of a word'. This notion of a 'distinctive sound' is what became widely known in the twentieth century as the phoneme;/tru/ might be suitable for the English wordtrue or the French wordtrou; andThe term 'broad' sometimes carries the extra implication that, as far as possible, unmodified letters of the roman alphabet have been used.Nardog (talk)23:58, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
decisions on which sounds qualify for their own letters depends on whether they're a phonemic distinction in languages, with exceptions like dentals. but it's still aphonetic alphabet; the phonemic criterion just means that few diacritics are needed for broad transcription, making for a cleaner appearance in many situations.— kwami (talk)03:16, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly! This is pointless… Compare English pronunciation of nameRobert(with [ɹ̠]) to Italian, Czech, Polish, Finnish or Dutch (with [r]). The difference is significant.
Dutch/r/ can be almost anything, including the very retroflex/postalveolar approximant you can find in English. Typical Northern Standard Dutch renditions of the name 'Robert' would be[ˈɾɔʊbəɹt] (alveolar tap + pre-velar approximant),[ˈʀɔʊbəɹt] (uvular trill + PVA) and[ˈʀɔʊbəʁ̞t] (UT + uvular approximant, maybe slightly less standard) and now almost archaic (?)[ˈɾɔʊbəɾt] (with two alveolar taps). Alveolar trills are rare and their consistent usage is even rarer. Search for clips of Eddy Poelman and tell me if it sounds like normal everyday Dutch to you - to me his trills are highly unusual. Same with Polish -/r/ is far more commonly a tap/fricative/approximant in that language. In both of them (and in English),/r/ is used for convenience, though in contemporary English ⟨r⟩ has little phonetic justification (save for local dialects).Sol505000 (talk)10:46, 15 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
These are phonemic representations, not phonetic ones. As such, we could use astrological etc. symbols if we wanted. (One phonemic analysis of a Micronesian language famously did precisely that.) Typically, people use the familiar basic Latin letters where they can, and try to avoid diacritics. This makes the transcription more legible.— kwami (talk)12:04, 15 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This page is using the basic⟨r⟩ grapheme to represent the cross-dialectal phoneme, not the symbol that reflects its realization in specific dialects. Also, check out the page's first paragraph.Largoplazo (talk)18:21, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Why are some examples using explicitly merged words?
It seems counterproductive at best, and a prank on the reader at worst, to use examples like "Mary, marry, merry" in the table. Shouldn't examples be chosen such that the greatest number of speakers would pronounce the word in the indicated way? For example, "moral" which I pronounce with ɔɹ, could be "borrow" instead, like it's own footnote says, and which more people, myself included, pronounce with ɒɹ.Tesserex (talk)14:27, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Certain major English dialects pronounce "Mary" differently than "marry". If yours doesn't, then you can assume to just collapse /ær/ and /ɛər/ together. Certain major English dialects pronounce "moral" differently than "more'll" (as in "I don't have enough shipments, but more'll come soon"). If yours doesn't, then you can assume to just collapse /ɒr/ and /ɔːr/. (I sense you have an American accent? In most American dialects,borrow falls under a third category: /ɑːr/, so that the first syllable ofborrow is the same asbar.)Wolfdog (talk)14:57, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Read the paragraph preceding the tables. We don't want to convey specific sounds because they're not what the diaphonemes represent. We want to convey whatever is the realization in each reader's accent.Nardog (talk)03:21, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
