International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. The IPA is used by linguists, lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical sounds in spoken language: phones, intonation and the separation of syllables. To represent additional qualities of speechsuch as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft palatean extended set of symbols may be used.
Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types: letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter:, or with a letter plus diacritics:, depending on how precise one wishes to be. Similarly, the French letter may be transcribed as either or : and are two different, though similar, sounds. Slashes are used to signal phonemic transcription; therefore, is more abstract than either or and might refer to either, depending on the context and language.
Occasionally, letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 segmental letters, an indefinitely large number of suprasegmental letters, 44 diacritics, and four extra-lexical prosodic marks in the IPA. These are illustrated in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and on the International Phonetic Association's website.

History

In 1886, a group of French and English language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association. The idea of the alphabet had been suggested to Passy by Otto Jespersen. It was developed by Passy along with other members of the association, principally Daniel Jones.
The original IPA alphabet was based on the Romic alphabet, an English spelling reform created by Henry Sweet that, in turn, was based on the Palaeotype alphabet of Alexander John Ellis, itself derived from Lepsius Standard Alphabet first used for transcribing Ancient Egyptian into German.
The original intent was to make it usable for other languages; the values of the symbols were allowed to vary from language to language. For example, the sound was originally represented with the letter for English but with for French and German; with German, was used for the sound of Bach. With a growing number of transcribed languages this proved impractical, and in 1888 the values of the letters were made uniform across languages. This would provide the base for all future revisions.
Since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After relatively frequent revisions and expansions from the 1890s to the 1940s, the IPA remained nearly static until the Kiel Convention in 1989, which substantially revamped the alphabet. A smaller revision took place in 1993 with the resurrection of letters for mid central vowels and the retirement of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap. Apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely of renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces.
Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990 and were officially adopted by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association in 1994.
They were substantially revised in 2015 with lesser changes in 2025.

Description

The general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound. This means that:

It does not use combinations of letters to represent single sounds, the way English does with and, nor single letters to represent multiple sounds, the way represents or in English.
There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, the way English and have a "hard" and "soft" pronunciation.
The IPA does not generally have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as "selectiveness". However, if a large number of phonemically distinct letters can be derived with a single diacritic, that may be used instead.

The alphabet is designed for transcribing sounds, not phonemes, though it is used for phonemic transcription as well. A few letters that did not indicate specific sounds have been retired, once used for the "compound" tone of Swedish and Norwegian, and, once used for the moraic nasal of Japanesethough one remains:, used for the sj-sound of Swedish. When the IPA is used for broad phonetic or for phonemic transcription, the letter–sound correspondence can be rather loose. The IPA has recommended that more 'familiar' letters be used when that would not cause ambiguity. For example, and for and, for or, for, etc. Indeed, in the illustration of Hindi in the IPA Handbook, the letters and are used for and ; in the 1949 Principles, they had been used as shortcuts for and in Twi.
Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 letters represent consonants and vowels, 31 diacritics are used to modify these, and 17 additional signs indicate suprasegmental qualities such as length, tone, stress, and intonation. These are organized into a chart; the chart displayed here is the official chart as posted at the website of the IPA.

Letter forms

The International Phonetic Alphabet is based on the Latin script, and uses as few non-Latin letters as possible. The non-Latin letters are meant to harmonize with the Latin letters. For this reason, most letters are either Latin, Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop,, originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed. A few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative,, were inspired by other writing systems.
The Association created the IPA so that the sound values of most letters would correspond to "international usage". Hence, the consonant letters,,,,,,,,,,,,,, and have more or less their word-initial values in English ; and the vowel letters,,,, correspond to the sound values of Latin: is like the vowel in machne, is as in rle, etc. Other Latin letters, particularly, and, differ from English, but have their IPA values in Latin or other European languages.
Beyond the letters themselves, there are secondary symbols which aid in transcription. Diacritic marks can be combined with the letters to add tone and phonetic detail such as secondary articulation. There are also special symbols for prosodic features such as stress and intonation.

Typography

The basic Latin inventory was extended by adding small-capital and cursive forms, overlapping diacritics such as hooks, and rotation. The sound values of these letters are related to those of the original letters or to those of letters that they were modified to resemble.
For example, rotated letters were popular in the era of mechanical typesetting, as they had the advantage of not requiring the casting of special type for IPA symbols, much as the sorts for and, and, and, and and had traditionally often pulled double duty to reduce printers' costs. Thus rotated recall a e r w, while rotated recall o j b y u/w ᴀ y/λ.
There are several letters from the Greek alphabet, though their sound values may differ from Greek. For most Greek letters, subtly different glyph shapes have been devised for the IPA, specifically,,,, and, which are encoded in Unicode separately from their parent Greek letters. One, however – – has only its Greek form, while for and, both Greek and Latin forms are in common use.

Iconicity

The graphic derivation of letters and diacritics may be iconic:

A rightward-facing hooked tail, as in, indicates retroflex articulation. It originates from the hooked arm of an r.
The top hook, as in, indicates implosion.
Several nasal consonants are based on the form :. and derive from ligatures of gn and ng.
Among consonant letters, the small capital letters, and also in extIPA, indicate more guttural sounds than their base letters is a late exception. Among vowel letters, the small capitals indicate what had originally been considered more lax articulations than their base letters; had originally been. Again, small-cap is a late exception.
The tone letters derive from a pitch trace on a musical scale.
Other representations

IPA letters have cursive forms designed for use in manuscripts and when taking field notes, but the Handbook recommended against their use, as cursive IPA is "harder for most people to decipher". A braille representation of the IPA for blind or visually impaired professionals and students has also been developed.

Modifying the IPA chart

The International Phonetic Alphabet is occasionally modified by the Association. After each modification, the Association provides an updated simplified presentation of the alphabet in the form of a chart. Not all aspects of the alphabet can be accommodated in a chart of the size published by the IPA. The alveolo-palatal and epiglottal consonants, for example, are not included in the consonant chart for reasons of space rather than of theory, and the lateral flap would require an additional row for that single consonant, so they are listed instead under the catchall block of "other symbols". The indefinitely large number of tone letters would make a full accounting impractical even on a larger page, and only a few examples are shown, and even the tone diacritics are not complete; the reversed tone letters are not illustrated at all.
The procedure for modifying the alphabet or the chart is to propose the change in the Journal of the IPA. Reactions to the proposal may be published in the same or subsequent issues of the Journal. A formal proposal is then put to the Council of the IPA – which is elected by the membership – for further discussion and a formal vote.
Many users of the alphabet, including the leadership of the Association itself, deviate from its standardized usage.
The Journal of the IPA finds it acceptable to mix IPA and extIPA symbols in consonant charts in their articles.