The International Phonetic Alphabet

I figured it’s about time I got around to teaching you all about the International Phonetic Alphabet, since it will probably come in handy in future TKT posts. I’ll stick to the IPA symbols used in English, though I’ll probably toss some of the ones for French up here eventually as well. That being said, let’s get started!

The first thing you need to understand about IPA is that it has NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW YOU SEE WORDS SPELLED ON PAPER. Forget everything you ever learned about orthography in school (for some of you, that’s a done deed already), and just think about English as it is spoken. IPA is an alphabet used to graphically represent (i.e. transcribe) the spoken word as accurately as possible. After all, spoken language came looooooooong before written language, and the evolution of written language is complicated enough that it would require its own post…or seven. Written language history is complicated and insane, believe me, and that’s just thinking about English, not to mention the rest of the languages on the planet. IPA takes out all the quirks of loan words, words whose pronunciation has evolved but the written word hasn’t, and so forth. So let’s have a look at it, shall we?

The following is a list of symbols for transcribing English consonants. Next to the symbols is a word to help understand the pronunciation, and following that is the name of the symbol. Not all of these may show up depending on your browser which is why I’ve included the name of the symbol*. I hope they all work!

And now here are the vowels in American English. These are far more complicated, technically, because the consonants preceding and following a vowel often “color” its pronunciation, not to mention British English is an entity all its own when it comes to vowels. English also has a lot of diphthongs where one vowel slides into another, as you’ll see below where there are two vowels against each other. In addition, the syllable in which a vowel is found often alters its length or quality. The /r/ sound alters vowels in English so much that there are special symbols for several vowels to accommodate this change. Also, regional differences in vowels alter their qualities making them higher or lower, or more fronted or more to the back of the mouth. Currently, parts of the United States are undergoing a vowel shift, but that’s a topic for another TKT. Below, you’ll see that some vowels are followed by a colon which indicates a longer vowel. Those followed by /r/ indicates a vowel colored by the /r/ sound. At any rate, vowels away:

A perfect example of a word’s pronunciation evolving but the written word stayed the same is “knight.” It’s pronounced [naɪt] but certainly not written that way! But that’s how IPA works: you write down only the sounds that you hear. IPA also has symbols to mark where a word is stressed as well as voice quality like “breathy-voiced,” “creaky-voiced,” and “murmurs.” Clicks, common in certain African languages, are also represented using symbols as well as tone, common in many Chinese dialects. Aspiration (a puff of air after a stop) can be shown in addition to ejectives (pharynx air compressed by the upward movement of the closed glottis) and even implosive sounds (downward movement of the vibrating glottis). There are so many diacritics (small added marks that can be used to distinguish different values of a symbol), that you can transcribe exactly how a person says a word down to whether they lisp just a little or articulate a sound in a unique way. I won’t get into diacritics like this because it would take a book (Speaking of which, most of this is from Ladefoged’s A Course in Phonetics, and if you’re interested in phonetics at all, this is the book to buy!), and they’re not really necessary for generic transcription anyway.

So, you transcribe a word by writing its sounds in IPA within brackets like this: “sit” [sɪt]. My name is “Erin” [ɛrɪn]. You can leave a space between syllables like this [ɛr ɪn], but the spoken language doesn’t really have breaks in it like that very much, so writing it as a whole is fine. Sometimes a period is put between syllables as well like this: “braindead” [breɪn.dɛd] It’s often very hard for people to stop thinking about spelling and start thinking about sound because most people don’t pay very close attention to what they say or how they say it. For instance, the word “church” begins and ends with a sound that is actually a stop followed very closely by a fricative: [ʧɚʧ]. We’re just so used to it in English that we consider it one sound, but in a language that doesn’t have it like French, they don’t hear it the same way we do and would change it to a sound they do have, making it [ʃɚʃ]. That’s what gives foreigners “accents” when they learn English. By learning the sounds of another language rather than just its alphabet, it’s easier to get rid of that “foreign accent” when trying to speak fluently. IPA helps a lot with that because it crosses all languages and can be used to represent all their words.

Dictionaries may or may not use IPA as word pronunciation guides. Most dictionaries make up their own system which may or may not be useful to its users. Why they don’t just all use IPA, an international system that can be used by anyone worldwide, is beyond me. Everyone benefits by learning IPA because it’s a standardized system. Having standards is what makes the Internet possible, medicines available, and is the basis for important things like railroad tracks, building houses, and monetary systems. I’ll admit that even with standards, not everyone’s going to follow them to a T, but it’s a better starting point than having no standards at all.

So grab your dictionary (Provided you own one; you do own a dictionary, don’t you?!) and take a look in the front for its “guide to pronunciation.” Does it say it uses IPA? Does it look like a slightly modified version? Does it looks like someone just made up a completely new, arbitrary system that won’t help you ever again if you look up the same word in a different book? Just curious. Now that you know IPA exists and roughly what it looks like, it might help you in the future when looking up a new word and trying to determine how it’s pronounced.

So there’s IPA. Now a pop quiz! What are the following English words? Read the IPA and then figure out what word it is in English. The last one is a sentence, just to challenge you. 🙂

1. [kæt]       2. [dɛsk]       3. [greɪps]

4. [kəmpjutɚ]       5. [tɛləfoʊn]       6. [su:p]

7. [aɪ.laɪk.tu:.i:t.lɛ.tɪs]

*To find more IPA codes, visit this site with more Unicode information.