🔤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.¹² Every pronunciation section on LinguaCommons ultimately leans on it.

This guide is a practical orientation, not a substitute for the official chart. The symbol tables below use standard textbook keywords as approximate anchors; exact values vary by accent and language, so treat the example words as pointers, not definitions.²

The current chart — and why the date matters

The current official chart is the 2015 revision, which made minor wording and glyph changes to the 2005 chart (the 2005 revision itself added the labiodental flap ⱱ).¹ The Association publishes the chart in three sanctioned font renderings — IPA Kiel (the Association's "ideal"), Doulos SIL, and DejaVu Sans — and, unusually candidly, documents the known defects of each: no existing font matches the intended forms exactly, with the laminal diacritic, the labiodental flap, and click letters as recurring trouble spots.¹ Citing "the 2020 IPA chart" or other unofficial dates is a standard AI-generated error; 2015 is current.¹

• Licensing: the chart has been CC-BY-SA 3.0 since July 2012, with a prescribed attribution line — reproduce it with credit.¹
• The full specification is the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (Cambridge, 1999): principles, symbol definitions, and per-language "Illustrations of the IPA." Revisions are announced in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA).²³

The shape of the chart

The chart is organized into five regions, and knowing the regions is most of knowing the chart. (1) Pulmonic consonants — sounds made with an outward lung airstream — sit in a grid of place of articulation (columns, front-of-mouth to glottis) against manner (rows: plosive, nasal, trill, tap, fricative, approximant, lateral). Within a cell, the left symbol is voiceless and the right is voiced.¹² (2) Non-pulmonic consonants — clicks, voiced implosives, ejectives — use other airstreams. (3) Other symbols cover sounds that don't fit the grid neatly (e.g. ʍ, w, ɥ, affricate ties). (4) The vowel quadrilateral maps tongue height (close↔open) against backness (front↔back), with rounding paired at each point. (5) Diacritics, suprasegmentals, and tones refine any of the above.¹

Pulmonic consonants — the common core

A working subset of the pulmonic grid. Each symbol names a place, a manner, and a voicing; the keyword shows one language where the sound occurs.¹²

Vowels — the quadrilateral in a table

Vowels are placed by tongue height and backness, with lip rounding. The near-neighbours below are the ones learners most often confuse.¹²

Diacritics — modifying a base symbol

Diacritics attach to a base letter to add detail: voicing changes, secondary articulations, length, syllabicity, and place shifts. A small, high-frequency set covers most narrow transcription.¹²

Suprasegmentals — stress, length, tone

Beyond individual segments, the IPA marks properties that span syllables and words.¹

Slashes versus brackets: the distinction that does the work

The same symbols serve two jobs. Between slashes, /ˈwɔtə/ is a phonemic (broad) transcription — just the contrasts that matter in the language. Between square brackets, [ˈwɔːʔɐ] is a phonetic (narrow) transcription — what a speaker actually did, glottal stop and all.² Confusing the two, or treating IPA letters as language-specific spellings rather than sound definitions, are the classic learner errors.

Worked examples in Standard Southern British English show what "narrow" adds:

ASCII encodings of the IPA — and the trap that follows

Because early computers couldn't display IPA glyphs, several ASCII encodings were built to write phonetics in plain keyboard characters: SAMPA and its universal successor X-SAMPA, Evan Kirshenbaum's ASCII-IPA, AT&T's WorldBet, and ARPABET. Each has its own guide in this section. The critical thing to know up front: they are not interchangeable. The same ASCII letter can point at completely different IPA sounds depending on the scheme — the single most common phonetics error in AI-generated text.⁷⁸⁹¹⁰

The worst offenders — read this before trusting any bare ASCII phonetic string:

Take-away: Q, G, y, W, R, and H are the letters most likely to be misread across schemes. ARPABET is a special case — it is not an IPA transcription at all but a code for English phonemes, so its capital letters look like IPA but mean something else entirely.¹⁰ Where the schemes do agree, they agree well:

A drop of history

Founded in Paris in 1886 around Paul Passy's circle of language teachers, the Association built the chart through major twentieth-century revisions: the 1989 Kiel Convention (source of the modern click letters and several groupings), refinements in 1993/1996, the 2005 revision, and the 2015 chart.¹⁴ The alphabet began as a teaching aid and became the backbone of descriptive linguistics, lexicography, speech pathology, and language learning.

What the IPA deliberately leaves out

The chart covers typical speech sounds only. Disordered articulations are handled by the extIPA extensions, and long-domain voice settings (whisper, creak, falsetto…) by the VoQS system — both covered in their own guides in this section. The ASCII encodings of the IPA built for early computing (SAMPA, X-SAMPA and the rest) likewise have their own guides.¹

Computing and fonts

Unicode encodes the IPA (the IPA Extensions block and friends), so modern text handles it natively. For display, the Association's guidance stands: IPA Kiel is the ideal; Doulos SIL and DejaVu Sans are free, Unicode-compliant options — each with named symbol defects worth checking before publishing phonetic material.¹⁶

Five habits of accurate IPA use

• Cite the 2015 chart, and attribute it (CC-BY-SA) when reproducing chart material.¹
• Keep /phonemic/ and [phonetic] brackets straight — they claim different things.²
• Treat symbols as sound definitions, not letters of any language's spelling.⁵
• Never assume an ASCII phonetic string is scheme-neutral — check whether it is X-SAMPA, SAMPA, Kirshenbaum, WorldBet, or ARPABET first.⁷⁹
• For per-language detail, go to the JIPA "Illustrations of the IPA" series — a short phonetic description with a recorded passage for each covered language.³

Learn more

• Official IPA chart page (International Phonetic Association) — The 2015 chart in three sanctioned fonts, with licensing terms and per-font symbol caveats.
• Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (Cambridge, 1999) — The full specification with per-language Illustrations.
• Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA) — Where chart revisions and Illustrations are published.
• Pullum & Ladusaw, Phonetic Symbol Guide (2nd ed., Chicago, 1996) — Symbol-by-symbol history, incl. Americanist cross-references.
• Wells, Computer-coding the IPA (X-SAMPA spec, UCL, 1995) — The universal ASCII encoding of the whole IPA.