Introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet
Introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet
Written by: Reetam Bhattacharya
Edited by: Rehat Sra
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Have you ever noticed just how inconsistent English spelling is? The words “through tough thorough thought” pronounce the same sequence of letters ‘ough’ in four different ways. The letter ‘c’ seems like it’s redundant with the letters ‘k’ and ‘s’, and ‘y’ is a vowel, but only sometimes. ‘i goes before e except after c, unless ending in -ay as in neighbor or weigh’, except in a sufficiently weird ancient society. like ours.
It's clear that the English alphabet is not a true representation of sounds the way we were taught in school. While it’s easy enough to create specialized pronunciation systems, like those you might see in the dictionary (or “[ˈdikSHəˌnerē]”, as a dictionary might spell it), we start to run into issues when using these systems for other languages. Other languages have unique sounds— like the iconic French ‘r’—that can’t be accounted for with the English phonetic alphabet. The limitations of the English phonetic alphabet become clear when learning or teaching foreign languages. A teacher might liken the sound of Spanish ‘j’ to an English ‘h’, but they are not quite the same, which causes language students to struggle.
As a result, in 1886, French and English language teachers devised the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, to notate sounds across multiple languages. Based on an earlier 1877 English phonetic alphabet called the Romic alphabet, the IPA provided a way to consistently notate sounds between European languages, which was useful for teachers.
After 1888, however, the IPA began to be used to document the sound systems of other languages. Because these other languages had new sounds that weren’t in European languages,
the IPA gradually began to standardize and increase its number of sounds. This meant extending the Latin and Greek alphabets to accommodate the large number of sounds that exist in the world’s languages, which one alphabet couldn’t handle alone.
When using the IPA, you can put the notation in slashes // or square brackets []. Slashes represent phonemic or broad transcription and are usually the minimum to represent a word. The word “cogs” in English is broadly transcribed as /kɑgs/. Square brackets are narrow or phonetic transcription, and transcribe the actual sounds that people—sometimes as precise as individuals—say. The same word narrowly transcribed is [kʰɑgz]. Syllable breaks are indicated with a period, and stressed syllables are preceded /prə.ˈsi.dəd/ by tick marks.
The main attraction in the IPA, of course, are the sound symbols. The IPA strives to write every speech sound that can be consistently produced by the mouth. Most sounds are written with one symbol or one combination of symbols, and all symbols are pronounced in one way. For example, the English letter ‘c’ is transcribed as /k/ or /s/ depending on its actual pronunciation, and “tough thorough thought” becomes /təf θəroʊ θɑt/.
In order to create a system of every human speech sound, the IPA broke down sounds into consonants, vowels, and tones (which are not covered in this essay). Consonants are each uniquely defined by a combination of “place of articulation”, “manner of articulation”, and “voice”. Vowels are uniquely defined by “height”, “backness”, and “rounding”. These traits are shown on IPA consonant and vowel tables, which show a sample of simple, common sounds written in the IPA.
Consonants
Place of articulation (the columns) describes where in the mouth sounds are produced. They are organized from the front of the mouth on the left to back on the right. The mouthparts (like the lips, teeth, and tongue) involved are called articulators. Common places of articulation are, as follows:
- Bilabial: with both lips, from bi- (‘two’) and ‘lab’ (‘lip’)
- Labiodental: with the lower lip (‘lab’) and upper teeth (dental)
- Dental: tongue between the teeth or on the upper teeth
- Alveolar: tongue on the ridge behind the teeth (the alveolar ridge)
- Retroflex: tongue curled back to the top of the mouth, from retro-, meaning backwards, and flex, meaning bend
- Palatal: the flat of the tongue against the roof of the mouth (the hard palate) - Velar: the back of the tongue against the soft palate, also called the velum - Glottal: constriction within the voice box or larynx, named after the constricting part (the glottis) Manner of articulation (the rows) describes what the articulators are doing and how air passes between them.
- In plosives (also called “stops”) and taps, the articulators form a complete contact that is then released.
- Nasals release air through the mouth.
- Fricatives and approximants release air through progressively wider gaps between the articulators.
Finally, voice describes the behavior of the vocal cords and is typically simplified down to two kinds: voiced consonants vibrate the vocal cords, and voiceless ones do not.
To get a sense for the difference, put your finger to the front of your neck and alternate between a ‘ss’ sound and a ‘zz’ sound. ‘z’ is a voiced sound, while ‘s’ is voiceless, and you should feel a vibration with ‘z’ that is absent in ‘s’. This voice distinction applies to pairs like ‘t’ and ‘d’, ‘k’ and ‘g’, and ‘ch’ and ‘j’.
Interestingly, the voice distinction also applies to the two different kinds of ‘th’ sounds in English. The ‘th’ in thin is voiceless, while in this, it is voiced.
Some of these symbols will be completely new, but for most purposes, you really need these:
*English actually uses ɹ, but beginners don’t need to distinguish any r-like symbol from each other unless comparing languages.
To remember these symbols, try these tips:
- Greek theta θ makes the same th sound that the letter’s name begins with, and ð makes the other one.
- ʃ and ʒ are taller, archaic versions of s and z, so they make s-like and z-like sounds.
o It was once also acceptable to write š and ž for these sounds, and they will still work in a pinch.
o These are the sounds in fish and vision, respectively. The ‘zh’ sound also occurs in some other -sion words, like torsion and collision.
- The ‘ch’ sound is actually a ‘t’ + ‘sh’ sound, so it is transcribed accordingly. The same goes for the ‘j’ sound being a ‘d’ + ‘zh’ sound.
Vowels
Vowels work in a mostly different way, but again concentrate on a table of features. Vowel columns are defined by backness, or how far back in the mouth the vowel is produced. Vowel rows are defined by height or closeness, which describes the height of the tongue in the mouth. The third feature is whether the vowel is pronounced with the lips rounded or not.
The trouble with the IPA, once you understand the underlying system, is that it uses so many symbols. It makes it hard to read IPA transcriptions, write them yourself, and to type
even if you know all the symbols. Luckily, there are some solutions—let’s start with the vowels and work our way towards getting an intuition for the symbols.
Of those 28 vowel symbols, only about 14 of them are relatively common—still a lot, of course—but these are the essentials: It’s good to know how to read all 18 in this list, but you only need to be able to write and audibly distinguish 14 of them.
*these vowels are off-glided in English, meaning they end in a short ɪ or ʊ sound. They are actually [iɪ uʊ eɪ oʊ].
**this vowel is not different from the bot vowel in most American dialects of English which have the cot-caught merger.
When memorizing these symbols, it can help to remember a couple tips:
1. i, u, e, o, and a make the same sounds as they do in Spanish or Latin, not in English. 2. ɪ and ʊ are small capitals, representing a lower vowel than their lowercase counterparts i and u. You can think of it like they are more dense, which causes them to be centralized. 3. ɛ and ɔ are e and o with an opened side, because they are more open vowel sounds compared to e and o.
4. œ is a sound between o and e, and æ is a sound between a and e. Each, however, is still one vowel sound.
5. y is always a vowel. In French and Spanish, the letter Y is called “Greek I”, because it was originally a vowel.
6. ə is consistently the ‘uh’ sound in English, also called the schwa. ʌ represents a very similar sound, and is a small capital A, representing a weaker version of the ‘ah’ sound [a].
7. a and ɑ are rarely distinguished, but ɑ is shaped somewhat like an o, which is how it is often written in English.
As for the rest, you can use what you’ve learned about places and manners of articulation to figure out how they’re pronounced. A lot of learning phonetics is just making sounds at yourself.
But the IPA is, for most purposes, a tool, and the majority of users will only need to know it for one or two languages as a language learner, like when learning to pronounce new words. For the linguists among the readers, though, the IPA is a valuable skill if you plan to read grammars or any phonology or phonetics-related research or development, including working on text-to-speech or speech-to-text applications.
This article isn’t intended to be your last experience with the International Phonetic Alphabet. You can start to see it in all kinds of random places: in dictionary entries, on the first lines of Wikipedia pages, and in language textbooks. But I hope this helped give a good start to learning the IPA, and good luck with your future endeavors, whether in linguistics or otherwise!
Sources:
Kelly, John (1981). "The 1847 Alphabet: an Episode of Phonotypy". In Asher, R. E.; Henderson, Eugene J. A. (eds.). Towards a History of Phonetics. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 248–264. ISBN 0-85224-374-X.
International Phonetic Association (1999). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-63751-1.
IPA Chart, http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. Copyright © 2015 International Phonetic Association.
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