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Welcome to Basics:IPA. IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. Most of the information in this and related pages is from http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA a link to which can also be found in the sidebar labelled "IPA info" under "help". For information about the history and applications of IPA go there, as these pages are only for references to the IPA used throughout this wiki and, as a basic guide to IPA in general. Some basic phonetics will also be covered although this page does not assume any prior knowledge.
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What is IPA?
Throughout this wiki you will see many symbols in slashes // or square brackets []. Those symbols are generally IPA. The purpose of these symbols is to represent the sounds of other languages so that you know what they are and can pronounce them without having heard them.
Many text books and dictionaries, particularly old ones, will represent sounds with a strange variant of English spelling The Australian pronunciation of budgerigar for instance might be written as ba-je-ree-gah. The problem is that each of these syllables could be pronounced differently depending on the speaker's dialect and some are simply ambiguous, like the oo which in most dialects of English represents two distinct sounds, while u which is similar in certain American dialects, in others produces a further two distinct sounds. Furthermore, English has a limited range of sounds which make it very difficult to represent the sounds of a language like Arabic which has most of the sounds of English, and quite a few more to boot.
The solution to these problems is simple; invent a standard writing system capable of supporting all the sounds of the world's languages (and some others as well) in a clear consistent and unambiguous manner. We call this system IPA. Although there are many phonetic alphabets, and there was no universal law passed making IPA the one and only system of transcription, it is the most wide-spread today and almost all linguists can read and write it.
There is one problem with IPA and that is that it uses a lot strange characters. There are many phonetic alphabets which use only the basic ASCII characters (the letters and symbols found on the average keyboard). The most popular system is X-sampa which is a 1:1 transcription of IPA into basic ASCII. It is arguable ugly and at times difficult to read, but a lot faster than copy-pasting letters from and IPA chart.
/Phonemic/ and [Phonetic]
As was mentioned at the start of this page, IPA symbols will occur between slashes // and spare brackets [].
Symbols between square brackets are "phonetic transcriptions" or "narrow transcriptions" dealing with things called phones. A phone is the smallest unit of sound we can find. In theory, no language or person should ever be able to distinguish between two sounds if those sounds are considered to be the same phone. IPA has a lot of extra symbols which can be attached to basic ones in order to make clear exactly which phones are being discussed. The bottom line in, if an experienced linguist sees anything in square brackets, they should only be able to pronounce it one way, and all other linguists who see that transcription should pronounce it the same way as well.
Things between slashes are what are called "phonemic transcriptions" or "broad transcriptions" dealing with sounds called phonemes. A language has many sounds, but each individual sound can be many phones. For instance the /k/ sound of English. words like "car" and "key" both start with what any child will identify as "a k sound". However, the sound of the k in "car" is written [kʰ] while the k in key is written [cʰ] because the tongue is in a different position when making them. To English speakers this is not apparent as a k or c is always pronounced [kʰ] before an a, o, u, or consonant. while a k is always a [cʰ] before e, i, or y. These two phones are the same phoneme because both are "a k sound" but because there are strict rules governing when the k/c is pronounced one way or the other, these two phones are in what we call "complementary distribution" (when one sound can be said in two completely different ways depending on its circumstances).
The quickest way to tell whether two different phones are also two different phonemes, is to look for a minimal pair. A minimal pair is a pair or words which are identical except for one sound. An example of this is "pat" and "bat". These words are the same except that one starts with a [pʰ] and the other with a [b]. This proves that [pʰ] and [b] are two distinct sounds in English and are therefore phonemes.
There is a third sound however [p]. This sound does not exist in English per se, but it's half-way between a p and a b. or [pʰ] and [b]. If you were to take the word "bat" and alternately pronounce it with a [p] or a [b], most native monolingual speakers of English would identify them as the exact same word because to English ears [b] and [p] are the same, in fact some people use [p] when they mean [b] and most people use both depending on circumstance. The reason no-one notices this is that [p] and [b] do not constitute a minimal pair and are therefore the same phoneme. Therefore, when phonemically transcribing English, a lot of people replace [pʰ] with [p] since it is not necessary to add [ʰ] to [p] to distinguish it form [b].
So phonemic and phonetic transcriptions differ in these two main features:
1/ any sound which is pronounced differently by different speakers, and/or changes it pronunciation depending on its location in a word will (as long as there are clear rules for these sound changes) use the same symbol throughout
2/ a sound which does not need to have modifiers added to it to make it clear which sound is being spoken about will be written without the unnecessary modifiers
You may also occasionally see sounds between angular brackets <>, these are sued to represent how something in written in the language and do not represent the sound.
IPA Symbols
This page doesn't go into detail about the pronunciation of individual symbols, but rather the symbols will link to individual pages which go into greater depth. When studying a particular language, you will proably only find a handful of symbols you cannot figure out and this page provides an easy way to find the link to the page which explains the relevant sound or symbol.
Someone who plans to work with or study many languages or sounds, whether for phonetic, linguistic, or other accademic reasons, should try to become familiar with most of the sounds of the IPA or at least with how a sound from a certain place or manner of articulation will sound because innability to decipher IPA will greatly hinder language skill.
Consonants
Sounds fall into one of two categories; consonants and vowels.
Consonants are sounds made pushing air through the mouth or nose. There are three main ways to achieve this:
Building up and releasing pressure with the tongue. These sounds are called clicks.
Building up and releasing pressure with the glottis. these sounds are called ejectives
Building up and releasing pressure with the lungs. These sounds are called pulmonic.
Pulmonic Consonants
the following table shows the basic pulmonic consonants organised by where in the mouth they are made, and how they are made.
| Place of articulation → | Labial | Coronal | Dorsal | Radical | Glottal | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilabial | Labiodental | Dental | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Pharyngeal | Epiglottal | |||||||
| Manner of articulation ↓ | |||||||||||||||||
| Nasal | m | ɱ | n | ɳ | ɲ | ŋ | ɴ | ||||||||||
| Plosive | p b | p̪ b̪ | t d | ʈ ɖ | c ɟ | k ɡ | q ɢ | ʡ | ʔ | ||||||||
| Fricative | ɸ β | f v | θ ð | s z | ʃ ʒ | ʂ ʐ | ç ʝ | x ɣ | χ | ʁ | ħ | ʕ | ʜ | ʢ | h ɦ | ||
| Approximant | β̞ | ʋ | ɹ | ɻ | j | ɰ | |||||||||||
| Trill | ʙ | r | ʀ | я* | |||||||||||||
| Tap or Flap | ⱱ̟† | ⱱ† | ɾ | ɽ | ɢ̆ | ʡ̯ | |||||||||||
| Lateral Fricative | ɬ ɮ | * | * | * | |||||||||||||
| Lateral Approximant | l | ɭ | ʎ | ʟ | |||||||||||||
| Lateral Flap | ɺ | * | ʎ̯ | ʟ̆ | |||||||||||||
- Notes
- Asterisks (*) next to symbols mark reported sounds that do not (yet) have official IPA symbols. See the respective articles for ad hoc symbols found in the literature.
- Daggers (†) mark IPA symbols that have recently been added to Unicode. As of Unicode 5.1.0, this is the case of the labiodental flap, symbolized by a v with a right-hook: File:Labiodental flap (Gentium).svg. These display properly with a recent version of Charis SIL, Doulos SIL or DejaVu fonts installed.
- In rows where some symbols appear in pairs (the obstruents), the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant (except breathy-voiced [ɦ]). However, [ʔ] cannot be voiced, and the voicing of [ʡ] is ambiguous.<ref>Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996, Sounds of the World's Languages, §2.1.</ref> In the other rows (the sonorants), the single symbol represents a voiced consonant.
- Although there is a single symbol for the coronal places of articulation for all consonants but fricatives, when dealing with a particular language, the symbols may be treated as specifically dental, alveolar, or post-alveolar, as appropriate for that language, without diacritics.
- Shaded areas indicate articulations judged to be impossible.
- The symbols [ʁ, ʕ, ʢ] represent either voiced fricatives or approximants.
- In many languages, such as English, [h] and [ɦ] are not actually glottal, fricatives, or approximants. Rather, they are bare phonation.<ref>Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996, Sounds of the World's Languages, §9.3.</ref>
- It is primarily the shape of the tongue rather than its position that distinguishes the fricatives [ʃ ʒ], [ɕ ʑ], and [ʂ ʐ].
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