The International Phonetic Alphabet I -- An Introduction

This is the first of a series of six related articles on the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA). In this article you are introduced to the fundamental purpose of the IPA, some basic terminology of phonology (the study of uttered sounds), and to some conventions of notation that should be mastered before you go any further into the subject.

Origin of the IPA.

Over 120 years ago, in Paris, several linguists started developing the International Phonetic Alphabet to express the different sounds of human speech without relying on the phonetic conventions of any one specific language. Today the IPA contains 107 symbols in its alphabet, plus 56 other diacritics and prosody marks. A "diacritic" is an addition to a letter that indicates more precisely how it should be pronounced. Common examples are the acute and grave accents in French, or the hacek in several Eastern European languages. A prosody mark tells you where a word should be stressed, or alternatively what the rhythmic phrasing should be.

Symbols in the IPA.

Most of the IPA's symbols come from the Latin, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, and are familiar. A few are morphs of such letters, while others are likely to be totally new to you. To see all the IPA characters exactly, you need to use a "Unicode" typeset. This article can not reproduce this, but by following a link in the author"s resource section you can go to pages that show the IPA tables using the correct fonts.

You can't tell, a priori, how a given IPA symbol should be pronounced. You just have to study the tables. For example, the English representation of a sound as "sh" only makes sense if you already know English. Even so, a plain "s" in English can sound like a soft "sh" on occasion (as in "fusion" or "leisure"). The letter "s" also can spell the sound of a snake hissing ("this") or a fly buzzing ("is"). In the IPA, the "sh" sound in "push" is represented as a long vertical line with a curve to the right at the top, and a curve to the left at the bottom, as if someone had taken the "s" and pulled the center apart to make it straight. The "sh" sound as in "fusion" or "leisure" is shown as a "z" with an over-sized comma hanging down from the bottom right, making it look a little like a "3" with a flat top.

The many symbols and markings in the IPA are used to describe the sounds created when a person uses the lips, teeth, tongue, palate, nose, throat, vocal chords and lungs even other parts of the body -- to communicate. Each letter uniquely describes a specific sound. The sound "ch" (English spelling), for example, may be written a number of different ways around the world, but the IPA depicts it as [c]. The hard "c" in English is [k] and the soft "c" is [s]. Since "c" is pronounced with a "ch" sound in many languages, the experts agreed to give it this sound in the IPA.

Distinguish Noises from Concepts.

In phonetics, a "phoneme" is really the ideal or concept of a sound. It is what the brain causes you to think you said. This is often not the same as the sound that actually comes out of the mouth. That is called a phone" (Greek for sound"). In notation, the concept or ideal for the sound the theoretical sound, if you will is represented between slashes, thus: /c/. This is the "ch" phoneme mentioned earlier. The sound a person really makes -- the "phone" -- is put in brackets, thus: [c]. This is the "ch" as pronounced. If you want to talk about the symbol "c" in IPA-speak, specifying its appearance in writing rather than as a phone or a phoneme, it is represented thus: .

Try to keep these usages straight, as they really do help avoid confusion later. For example, the is a liquid consonant at the end of the word "ball." As a phoneme, it is the /l/. In Japan, the phone might be [r], since /l/ and /r/ are said to be the same phoneme in the native Japanese brain.

Likewise, the English-speaking brain finds several phonemes in Chinese (of the family /dz/ and it variations) to be indistinguishable, and pronounces them all [dz] like the "ds" in "fads."

In the next article, we shall cover "allophones" and "diphthongs." Later, we'll look at the vocal tract and how it relates to individual IPA symbols.