History of the IPA

The International Phonetic Alphabet was created soon after the International Phonetic Association was established in the late 19th century. It was intended as an international system of phonetic transcription for oral languages, originally for pedagogical purposes. The association was established in Paris in 1886 by French and British language teachers led by Paul Passy. The first published alphabet appears in Passy (1888). The association based their alphabet upon the Romic alphabet of Henry Sweet (1880 or 1881–1971), which in turn was based on the Phonotypic Alphabet of Isaac Pitman and Palæotype of Alexander John Ellis

The alphabet has undergone a number of revisions during its history, though the 1932 version was used for over half a century with only minor adjustments until the IPA Kiel Convention of 1989, after which again only minor adjustments were made.

The extIPA for speech disorders was created in 1991 and revised in 1997.

The International Phonetic Association was founded in Paris in 1886 under the name Dhi Fonètik Tîcerz' Asóciécon (The Phonetic Teachers' Association), a development of L'Association Phonétique des Professeurs d'Anglais (The English Teachers' Phonetic Association), to create an international phonetic alphabet primarily for English, French, and German. Many of the symbols derived from Sweet's Revised Romic alphabet.

Originally the symbols had different phonetic values from language to language. For example, ⟨c⟩ transcribed both English and French ch. However, over time it was decided to restrict each symbol to a single pronunciation. In 1887, the first draft of this standardized alphabet, adequate for English, French, and German, was published, as follows:

Note: this early version of the IPA was presented as a list (with examples from European languages) instead of the articulatory charts used today.

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