⌨️Kirshenbaum (ASCII-IPA)

Kirshenbaum — also called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA — is an ASCII encoding of the International Phonetic Alphabet: a way of writing IPA using only the characters on a plain keyboard. It was developed by Evan Kirshenbaum and collaborators between about 1991 and 1993 on Usenet (the newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english), so that people could discuss pronunciation in email and newsgroup posts before Unicode made real IPA glyphs easy to type. The defining document is Kirshenbaum's spec circulated in that period; a widely-referenced "second draft" appeared in sci.lang in January 1993.¹²

Its design goal is one ASCII character per IPA segment wherever possible, with brace/bracket feature notation as a fallback for sounds that have no obvious single-letter code. It predates and competes with X-SAMPA, and — crucially — the two schemes assign some of the same ASCII letters to different sounds. That overlap is the number-one source of confusion when reading ASCII phonetics online.²⁴

Where it still lives: eSpeak NG

Kirshenbaum's main modern institutional home is the eSpeak / eSpeak NG speech synthesizer, which represents phonemes using Kirshenbaum-scheme ASCII. The eSpeak NG repository documents the scheme directly, which makes that file the best living reference for the exact values in current use.³

The dangerous overlaps with X-SAMPA

Because Kirshenbaum and X-SAMPA grew up independently, several ASCII letters mean different IPA sounds in each. Never convert an ASCII string from one scheme to another by assuming a shared letter value — identify the scheme first, then read the right column.³⁴

Kirshenbaum also uses its own conventions elsewhere — a period marks retroflexes (n. for ɳ), <trl> marks a trill (r<trl> for a full alveolar trill), and * is the alveolar tap ɾ — none of which line up with X-SAMPA's codes for the same sounds.³

Status: a community spec, not a standard

Kirshenbaum was never ratified by a standards body. It is a well-designed community convention whose authority comes from its clear original spec and its adoption in eSpeak — not from any official body the way SAMPA came out of an EU project. Treat it accordingly: cite the spec or the eSpeak documentation, and don't describe it as a formal standard.¹³

Errors to avoid

• Reading Kirshenbaum text with X-SAMPA values, or vice versa — especially the Q, G, W, R, H letters above.³⁴
• Calling any ASCII phonetic transcription "Kirshenbaum" — X-SAMPA, SAMPA, and WorldBet are separate schemes with different assignments.⁴
• Assuming it is standardized beyond the community spec and the eSpeak implementation.¹
• Forgetting the apostrophe means stress here, not palatalization.³

Learn more

• eSpeak NG — Kirshenbaum transcription scheme (docs) — The living reference: exact values as used by the synthesizer.
• Comparison of ASCII encodings of the IPA (Wikipedia) — Side-by-side conduit for Kirshenbaum ↔ X-SAMPA ↔ SAMPA divergences.
• X-SAMPA — our companion guide — The rival ASCII-IPA scheme it is most often confused with.
• The IPA — our companion guide — The Unicode target that all these ASCII schemes encode.