The IPA
Every alphabet on this site lies about sound, each in its own way. The International Phonetic Alphabet is the repair: one symbol per sound, for every language a human mouth has produced. Six short modules; by the end you can read the transcriptions in any dictionary on your shelf.
One sound, one symbol
Ordinary spelling records history, politics and habit; only occasionally sound. The IPA was invented to write down what the mouth actually does.
The alphabet is an unreliable witness
English is an extreme case, but no ordinary orthography escapes. Spelling is frozen history; pronunciation kept moving after the ice set.
So the phoneticians built their own
The association and the alphabet share the abbreviation IPA, which is occasionally confusing even to phoneticians. The alphabet's core is roughly a hundred letters, extended by diacritics; most single languages use only two or three dozen of them.
One sound, seven costumes
Seven orthographies, seven disguises; the IPA writes every one of them ʃ. Next: where that symbol comes from.
Where sounds are made
Every consonant is an address with three lines: where the air is obstructed, how it is obstructed, and whether the voice is switched on. The IPA chart is simply the street map.
Three questions, any consonant
s and z are a minimal pair of the machine itself: identical place, identical manner, voicing flipped. The chart you are about to meet arranges every consonant by exactly these three lines.
A working slice of the chart
Where a cell holds two symbols, the left is voiceless and the right voiced; the IPA's own convention. This is a teaching slice, not the full chart; the real one adds retroflex and palatal columns, clicks, implosives and more.
Addresses English never visits
A voiced pharyngeal fricative: the throat itself narrows. The sound learners of Arabic circle for months; on the chart it is just one column further back than anything English uses.
A uvular stop: like k, but struck against the very back of the soft palate. The difference between k and q is pure place; manner and voicing are identical.
A voiceless velar fricative: a k relaxed into a hiss. Russian хлеб (bread), Arabic خ, German Bach, Scottish loch; common everywhere, absent from standard Australian English.
None of these is exotic to the chart; each is one step along a row you already know. That is the point of the map.
The vowel space
Five is the number of letters. Australian English alone has around twenty vowel sounds; the IPA maps them not as a list but as positions in the open space of the mouth.
A vowel is a position, not a letter
Because the sliders are continuous, the IPA pins reference points into the space; a trapezium of agreed positions, drawn to match the mouth's actual room to move: more space at the top than at the bottom.
The map of the mouth
Three vowels worth the detour
Dead centre of the map: the tongue at rest. The most common vowel in English; the a of "about", both vowels of "kangaroo" that carry no stress. Unstressed English collapses towards it.
The ee-position with rounded lips; a front rounded vowel. English never rounds its front vowels, which is exactly why this one feels impossible for the first week of French.
A close central vowel: ee pulled back to the middle of the mouth. The famous hurdle of Russian мы (we) and ты (you); on the map it is simply the top edge, halfway along.
Letters run out; positions do not. Now for everything the segments cannot carry.
Stress, length and tone
Some of what a word means never touches a consonant or a vowel. It rides on top: which syllable is hit, how long a sound is held, where the pitch goes. The IPA writes all of it.
Stress: the hit that changes the word
Russian dictionaries mark stress with an acute accent precisely because the ordinary orthography refuses to; every Russian learner's misread of this pair is a stress error, not a spelling error. A lowered mark ˌ notes secondary stress.
Tone: pitch as vocabulary
Length: the colon that isn't
He wrote. Three short a-vowels; the plain past verb from the root walked through in the Root and pattern deck.
He corresponded with someone. One held vowel, one changed meaning; in the IPA the whole difference is the length mark ː.
In Arabic, vowel length is load-bearing grammar. The mark that carries it, ː, is two triangles, not a colon; the fine print is next.
The fine print
Diacritics are where the IPA stops sketching and starts engraving. Some of them mark differences your ear has been trained since childhood to ignore.
The puff you never noticed
In Hindi and Urdu that same puff is vocabulary: aspirated and unaspirated consonants are different letters and different words. What one language treats as noise, another treats as meaning; the notation has to carry both.
Korean splits the atom three ways
Moon. The plain consonant: no puff, no tension, just the stop.
Mask. The aspirated one; the pin-puff, promoted from noise to meaning.
Daughter. The tense one, made with a stiffened vocal tract; the IPA marks it with a small double line below.
Moon, mask, daughter: one consonant slot, three words. English ears hear one sound; Korean ears, and the IPA, hear three.
Six marks that do most of the work
Slashes and brackets
Same word, two depths of focus. You now have the whole toolkit; time to read.
Reading in the wild
The IPA is not a museum piece; it sits between slashes in every serious dictionary, on every Wikipedia pronunciation line, in every field linguist's notebook. Time to read it cold.
What a dictionary hands you
Dictionaries of Australian English transcribe the non-rhotic vowels directly: no r after a vowel, its work done by length and quality instead. The transcriptions in the next beat are Australian.
Now you read
Australian English squashes its unstressed vowels to ə and drops r after vowels. This city of five letters' worth of sound:
ŋ is the sing-sound and ˌ a lighter hit before the main ˈ. This animal:
The length mark is doing the work an r once did. This city:
Why this matters
Sources used: International Phonetic Association, Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (Cambridge, 1999), for the alphabet's principles, chart layout and history; P. Ladefoged & K. Johnson, A Course in Phonetics, for place, manner, voicing, the vowel space and aspiration (including the pin/spin demonstration); the Association's founding in Paris in 1886 around Paul Passy as given in its own historical record. Mandarin tone examples (mā, má, mǎ, mà) follow the standard description with Chao tone letters; Thai examples use the standard tone-category names; Korean tal / tʰal / t͈al is the standard minimal triple for the three-way stop contrast; Arabic forms are Modern Standard Arabic; Russian examples (за́мок/замо́к, брат/брать, мы, ты) are standard Russian. Australian English transcriptions follow general Australian, non-rhotic. The origin of "kangaroo" in Guugu Yimithirr gangurru is as documented from Cook's 1770 Endeavour River stay.