International phonetic alphabet
| International Phonetic Alphabet |
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|---|---|
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| Type |
Alphabet, partially featural
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| Languages | Used for phonetic and phonemic transcription of any language |
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Time period
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since 1888 |
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Parent systems
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Romic alphabet
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| Direction | Left-to-right |
| ISO 15924 | Latn, 215 |
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Unicode alias
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Latin |
| IPA vowel chart | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Paired vowels are: unrounded • rounded | |||||||||||||||||||
| This table contains phonetic symbols, which may not display correctly in some browsers. [Help] | |||||||||||||||||||
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IPA help • IPA key • chart •  chart with audio •
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The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of oral language: phones, phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech, such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft lip and cleft palate, an extended set of symbols, the extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet, may be used.
IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two basic types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter, [t], or with a letter plus diacritics, [t̺ʰ], depending on how precise one wishes to be. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription; thus, /t/ is less specific than, and could refer to, either [t̺ʰ] or [t], depending on the context and language.
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