Notation Systems
How linguists write sound down. These guides cover the International Phonetic Alphabet and its clinical extensions, the ASCII encodings built for early computing, and the Americanist tradition behind much of the documentation of Indigenous American languages — what each system is for, who maintains it, and the errors to avoid when reading or citing it.
Americanist Phonetic Notation — also called NAPA, the North American Phonetic Alphabet — is not a single chartered alphabet but a family of transcription conventions developed by North American anthropological linguists for documenting the Indigenous languages of the Americas. Its lineage runs from the Powell-era Bureau of American Ethnology alphabets through Boas to the famous 1934 "Some orthographic recommendations" (Herzog, Newman, Sapir, the Swadeshes & Voegelin, American Anthropologist 36(4): 629–631) — and it lives on, modernized, in Americanist journals and in many practical orthographies today.[^1][^2]
extIPA — Extensions to the IPA for Disordered SpeechThe extIPA is the standard supplementary symbol set for transcribing disordered and atypical speech — the phenomena the core IPA deliberately leaves out: atypical articulations and airstreams, atypical phonation and timing, indeterminate sounds, and connected-speech/silence notation. In the primary sources' own words, the symbols exist "to supply transcriptional resources to those needing to describe disordered speech of all types," chosen at the request of speech-language pathologists and clinical phoneticians.[^1][^2]
SAMPA — the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic AlphabetSAMPA is a machine-readable phonetic alphabet: it maps IPA symbols onto printable 7-bit ASCII (codes 33–127), created so phonetic transcription could survive the computing of the late 1980s — e-mail, databases, and speech-technology systems that could not render IPA glyphs.[^1] Crucially, SAMPA is not one universal mapping but a family: a core mapping plus per-language transcription guidelines, developed language by language with native speakers.[^1]
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)The IPA is the international standard notation for the sounds of spoken language, maintained by the International Phonetic Association since 1886. Its design promise: one symbol per distinctive sound, refined by diacritics, organized in the famous chart — pulmonic consonants in a place-by-manner grid, non-pulmonic consonants (clicks, implosives, ejectives), the vowel quadrilateral, diacritics, suprasegmentals, and tones.[^1][^2] Every pronunciation section on LinguaCommons ultimately leans on it.
VoQS — Voice Quality SymbolsVoQS (Voice Quality Symbols) is the standard notation for voice quality in transcription — the long-domain settings that colour whole stretches of speech rather than single segments: whisper, creak, falsetto, breathiness, harshness, laryngeal and supralaryngeal settings (labialized or nasalized speech settings), and special airstreams such as œsophageal and electrolarynx speech.[^1] Where the IPA describes segments and extIPA describes atypical segments, VoQS answers the third question a clinician or phonetician must ask: what is the voice doing over this whole stretch?
X-SAMPA — Wells's ASCII encoding of the full IPAX-SAMPA (Extended SAMPA) is John C. Wells's 1995 proposal for a keyboard-compatible ASCII coding of the entire IPA — "everything on the 1993 IPA Chart, including diacritics and tone marks" — so that IPA-transcribed material could travel over e-mail and other 7-bit channels.[^1] Where SAMPA is a family of per-language tables, X-SAMPA is one universal mapping. It remains the most widely used ASCII-IPA in linguistics-adjacent computing and hobbyist communities.