International Phonetic Alphabet

Abstract

The International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, is among the oldest and most fundamental tools of modern linguistic description and analysis. Established by the International Phonetic Association in the late nineteenth century, the IPA serves as a universal, standardized system for representing human speech, regardless of the language(s) of the speaker or the transcriber. The IPA has a number of useful qualities, the most important of which are (i) its one‐to‐one relationship between symbols and sounds and (ii) its goal of representing all of the sounds of the world's language. The symbols of the alphabet include both pulmonic and non‐pulmonic consonants, vowels, and a large set of diacritics that can mark variations from the unmarked form of a segment as well as certain prosodic features. Because of its centrality in the field, the IPA is often presented as an atheoretical tool, but the alphabet carries a number of both linguistic and sociocultural implications. Linguistically, it segments speech, identifies the relevant categories of contrast and analysis, and creates categorical distinctions for linear phenomena. Socioculturally, the IPA is grounded in the orthographic norms and language ideologies of Western Europe and is heavily shaped by the colonial history of linguistics and anthropology.