 | This is aninformation page. It is neither anencyclopedia article nor one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels ofconsensus andvetting. |
This is anintroduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for English-speaking Wikipedians. Its purpose is to explain the IPA's basic principles to English speakers. IPA clearly and unambiguously indicates how a word or name actually sounds with one letter for each sound. Wikipedia uses IPA because it's the global standard used by professionals and the only system used in most schools in the world.
IPA's most daunting feature is that it has discreteletters for almost all of the distinctive sounds found in the world's languages. (SeeInternational Phonetic Alphabet#Letters.) Fortunately, using the IPA for English requires learning only the following small subset of them:
The first principle is to not use Englishalphaphonemic pronunciations, as if you were reading the English alphabet. In the words below, the vowel letters are pronounced as in the English alphabet, but this is not a system found in any other language:
The English digraphsee, oo, au, ei, ai, ou, ie, eu, etc. are not used.
Several of these sounds are actually two vowel sounds combined, rather than pure vowel sounds as they are in Spanish or Italian: The letterA is pronounced/eɪ/,E, EE is/iː/,I is/aɪ/,O is/oʊ/, andU is/juː/. In the IPA, the letter/j/ is used for the EnglishY sound, thusyou andewe are transcribed/juː/. (Seebelow.) While transcribing in the IPA, you can write English alphaphonemic vowels as capitals: [rAk], [sEEm], [rIs], [dOt], [Uz], etc., and then convert from the conventions above:
Notes: English commonly requiresea oree to write the/iː/ sound:read, reed.
A w-like sound can be heard at the end ofO in words likeechoing (say:echo-echo-echoing, and it may come out likeecho-wecho-wecho-wing) and after theco- incooperate; that is what the/ʊ/ in the transcription/oʊ/ captures.
There are a couple other long vowels and diphthongs in English:OO sound infood (but notgood) is written/uː/:/fuːd/. That is, it is written like the vowel ofuse without the initialy sound/j/. As noted above, theOW sound ofdoubt orcow is written/aʊ/. There is also theOY sound/ɔɪ/ ofjoy,/dʒɔɪ/.
English short vowels are all transcribed by a single letter in the IPA.
Because English short vowelsa e i o u are closer to the Classical pronunciation (still found in Spanish and Italian) than the long vowels are, it is the short vowels which are transcribed with IPA letters which resemble the English lettersa e i o u. However, they are modified to show that they aren't exactly the Classical sounds. For thea sound ofcat, theOld English letteræ was resurrected:/kæt/. Thee i u sounds ofpet, pit, put (notputt) were originally written as capital letters, and that is sometimes still done with manual typewriters. However, small caps looked better, so they were for a time writtenE I U. These took more cursive forms over time, and are today written/ɛɪʊ/:pet/pɛt/,pit/pɪt/,put/pʊt/. The latter, of course, is also the shortoo sound ofgood/ɡʊd/. Theu vowel ofputt orcut, is written as an upturned letterv, e.g.cut/kʌt/. Some of you may not distinguish this vowel from that ofput, if so, you can think of /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ as representing the same sound.
Thea sound inbra is written with a Greekα, which looks like a single-storeya. Because it's long in many dialects, it's/ɑː/ in the IPA:/brɑː/. Likewise, theaw sound oflaw is long in many dialects, but, for many of you, different than thebra sound. It's written with an "open"o (just as/ɛ/ looks like an opene, since a small capo looks just like a regularoːlaw/lɔː/. (Some of you might not make this distinction, in which case you can think of these vowel letters as being the same when reading the IPA.) For those of you who distinguish it, there is a third similar sound, theo ofmop. This is written with thebra vowel letter rotated 180°:mop/mɒp/. The vowel sound inbird is written as an upturned/ɛ/], therefore it is written as/bɜrd/.
Finally, there's the slurredschwa sound found in many unstressed syllables, as at the end ofsofa. This is written/ə/, a symbol used in many US dictionaries. The stressed syllable is marked with a tick:sofa/ˈsoʊfə/. Note that the letter/ə/ is never used for a stressed vowel; for words likecut, we use/ʌ/:butter/ˈbʌtər/,cuppa/ˈkʌpə/.
While most IPA consonants are intuitive for English speakers, there are some caveats:
The English digraphsch, ng, qu, sh, th are not used.
IPA's purposes are to:
The second purpose concerns only linguists. The first purpose concerns any interested reader, but only to a limited degree, as transcribing words into IPA does not need to be perfect or overlyprecise (something for fluent IPA users to consider). The word "transcribe" is used to distinguish this from normal writing or spelling, which has other purposes (such as preserving word etymologies and meaning).
IPA is complex enough to represent nearly anything, but high-fidelity transcriptions will use glyphs that are unfamiliar to English readers and unpracticed in Englishphonology. For example a transcription of something like the Icelandic nameEyjafjallajökull is pronounced[ˈeiːjaˌfjatl̥aˌjœːkʏtl̥]ⓘ, meaningisland-mountain glacier, may approximate Icelandic phonology, but such information will likely be too much for English readers, who may need to reference the name using what is at best an approximate pronunciation anyway. (Often an English version of a foreign name will try to employ translation in combination with partial transcription, but this often stays unnecessarily close to the original spelling and therefore prevents English speakers from using sounds they can easily produce. For exampleEyja-fjalla glacier (['eija-f'jala]glacier) is a sufficiently close approximation, butEyja-fjatla glacier (['eija-f'jatla]glacier) would be closer and still easy to pronounce.)