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This is an introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for English-speaking Wikipedians. Its purpose is to explain the IPA's basic principles to English speakers. IPA clearly and unambiguously indicates how a word or name actually sounds with one letter for each sound. Wikipedia uses IPA because it's the global standard used by professionals and the only system used in most schools in the world.

IPA's most daunting feature is that it has discrete letters for almost all of the distinctive sounds found in the world's languages. (See International Phonetic Alphabet#Letters.) Fortunately, using the IPA for English requires learning only the following small subset of them:

• Vowels: English orthography uses 6 vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u, y) to represent some 15 vowel sounds. While the English system is compact, it is also ambiguous. The IPA is unambiguous, representing each vowel sound with a unique letter or sequence. (See the vowel audio chart). Note that most of what in English are called "long vowels", A, E, I, O, U, are in fact combinations of two sounds (diphthongs), which is why they are transcribed in the IPA with two letters apiece: /eɪ/Category:Pages with plain IPA, /iː/Category:Pages with plain IPA, /aɪ/Category:Pages with plain IPA, /oʊ/Category:Pages with plain IPA, and /juː/Category:Pages with plain IPA, respectively.^[1]
• Consonants: IPA consonants are mostly intuitive to an English speaker, with the same letter used for the same sound. Thus you already know /b, d, f, ɡ, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, z/Category:Pages with plain IPA, as long as you remember that these each have a single sound. For example, /ɡ/Category:Pages with plain IPA always represents the sound of get, never of gem, and /s/Category:Pages with plain IPA always the sound of so, never of rose. The letter which most confuses people is /j/Category:Pages with plain IPA, which has its Central-European values, a y sound as in the j in English hallelujah. Two English consonant sounds, ch in chair and j in jump, are transcribed with two IPA letters apiece, /tʃ/Category:Pages with plain IPA and /dʒ/Category:Pages with plain IPA. The English digraphs ch, ng, qu, sh, th are not used. See and hear also consonant audio chart.

Vowels

Consonants

While most IPA consonants are intuitive for English speakers, there are some caveats:

• The sound of the consonant Y is /j/Category:Pages with plain IPA, as in yes /ˈjɛs/Category:Pages with plain IPA and yellow /ˈjɛloʊ/Category:Pages with plain IPA.

  (This is the value the letter J has in central European languages like German and Polish. The IPA letter /y/Category:Pages with plain IPA is used for a non-English vowel, the French u, German ü, and Swedish y sound.)

• The NG sound of sing is written by combining the letter n with the tail of the g, /ŋ/Category:Pages with plain IPA, as in sing /ˈsɪŋ/Category:Pages with plain IPA. This is not the same as the sound in finger, which has an extra g sound: /ˈfɪŋɡər/Category:Pages with plain IPA. This sound also appears when n comes before a k, such as in sink /ˈsɪŋk/Category:Pages with plain IPA.
• The digraph TH is used for two sounds in English. Since the IPA uses a single letter for each sound, two new letters are required for these two sounds:
  • /θ/Category:Pages with plain IPA for the th in thick /ˈθɪk/Category:Pages with plain IPA (from the Greek letter theta)
  • /ð/Category:Pages with plain IPA for the th in those /ˈðoʊz/Category:Pages with plain IPA (from the Old English letter eth, which was used for the th sounds)
• The sound of the digraph SH is transcribed with the long S. It's used in its cursive form, /ʃ/Category:Pages with plain IPA, to make it easier to read, as in push /ˈpʊʃ/Category:Pages with plain IPA and shelf /ˈʃɛlf/Category:Pages with plain IPA.
• There is a sound with no letter or digraph in English, though sometimes written ZH in foreign words. It's usually written si, as in vision. In the IPA, it's written with a 'stretched' Z, /ʒ/Category:Pages with plain IPA: vision /ˈvɪʒən/Category:Pages with plain IPA.
• As noted above, the digraph CH is a sequence of sounds, T plus SH. This may be hard for an English speaker to hear, but is obvious to a French speaker, which is why we get spellings like Tchaikovsky but also catch in English. (Adding a t to ch doesn't make any difference, because the ch already has a t sound within it.) The IPA uses the same long S for this sound here as anywhere else: itch /ˈɪtʃ/Category:Pages with plain IPA.
• Similarly, the English consonant J is a sequence with a d sound in it. For instance, in judge, adding the d doesn't affect the consonant sound, just the vowel. In the IPA, this is transcribed /dʒ/Category:Pages with plain IPA: jump /ˈdʒʌmp/Category:Pages with plain IPA, judge /ˈdʒʌdʒ/Category:Pages with plain IPA, or Jesus /ˈdʒiːzəs/Category:Pages with plain IPA.
• Finally, the IPA letter [r]Category:Pages with plain IPA is officially a trill, as in Italian and Spanish. The rather unusual English R sound is transcribed with a turned r, [ɹ]Category:Pages with plain IPA. However, since this makes no difference within English, and not all English dialects actually use the [ɹ]Category:Pages with plain IPA sound, it's very common to see English R transcribed with a plain /r/Category:Pages with plain IPA, and that's the convention used on Wikipedia.
  • English is divided into rhotic and non-rhotic accents. Non-rhotic accents such as Received Pronunciation and Australian English do not pronounce [ɹ]Category:Pages with plain IPA at the end of a syllable. However, Wikipedia convention writes in a way that recognizes the rhotic pronunciation, even for places or words normally pronounced with a non-rhotic accent. For example, the pronunciation of the British town of Guildford is written as /ˈɡɪlfərd/Category:Pages with plain IPA, though the local pronunciation is /ˈɡɪlfəd/Category:Pages with plain IPA. Wikipedia does not follow the usual approach of many United Kingdom dictionaries which place the final r in parentheses.

The English digraphs ch, ng, qu, sh, th are not used.

IPA's purpose and Wikipedia's use of IPA

IPA's purposes are to:

1. represent the phonetics of words (how they sound) and
2. to give samples of the phonology of a language (how the language as a whole sounds).

The second purpose concerns only linguists. The first purpose concerns any interested reader, but only to a limited degree, as transcribing words into IPA does not need to be perfect or overly precise (something for fluent IPA users to consider). The word "transcribe" is used to distinguish this from normal writing or spelling, which has other purposes (such as preserving word etymologies and meaning).

IPA is complex enough to represent nearly anything, but high-fidelity transcriptions will use glyphs that are unfamiliar to English readers and unpracticed in English phonology. For example a transcription of something like the Icelandic name Eyjafjallajökull is pronounced [ˈeiːjaˌfjatl̥aˌjœːkʏtl̥] ^ⓘCategory:Pages with Icelandic IPACategory:Pages including recorded pronunciations, meaning island-mountain glacier, may approximate Icelandic phonology, but such information will likely be too much for English readers, who may need to reference the name using what is at best an approximate pronunciation anyway. (Often an English version of a foreign name will try to employ translation in combination with partial transcription, but this often stays unnecessarily close to the original spelling and therefore prevents English speakers from using sounds they can easily produce. For example Eyja-fjalla glacier (['eija-f'jala] glacier) is a sufficiently close approximation, but Eyja-fjatla glacier (['eija-f'jatla] glacier) would be closer and still easy to pronounce.)

Notes