For each IPA symbol, an English example is given where possible; here "RP" stands for Received Pronunciation. The foreign languages that are used to illustrate additional sounds are primarily the ones most likely to be familiar to English speakers, ਫ਼ਰਾਂਸੀਸੀ, German, and Spanish. For symbols not covered by those, recourse is taken to the populous languages Mandarin Chinese, ਪੰਜਾਬੀ, Arabic, and Russian. For sounds still not covered, other smaller but well-known languages are used, such as Swahili, Turkish, and Zulu.
The left-hand column displays the symbols like this: (i)[ a ]. Click on the speaker icon to hear the sound; click on the symbol itself for a dedicated article with a more complete description and examples from multiple languages. All the sounds are spoken more than once, and the consonant sounds are spoken once followed by a vowel and once between vowels.
This article includes inline links to audio files. If you have trouble playing the files, see Wikipedia Media help.
The 'glottal stop', a catch in the breath. For some people, found in button [ˈbʌʔn̩], or between vowels across words: Deus ex machina [ˌdeɪəsˌʔɛksˈmɑːkɨnə]; in some nonstandard dialects, in a apple [ʌˈʔæpl̩].
English tsk-tsk! or tut-tut!, Zulu icici "earring"
(The English click used for disapproval.) Several distinct sounds, written as digraphs, including [kǀ],[ɡǀ],[ŋǀ]. The Zimbabwean MP Ncube has this click in his name, as did Cetshwayo.
(The English click used to imitate the trotting of a horse.) A hollow popping sound, like a cork pulled from a bottle. Several distinct sounds, written as digraphs, including [kǃ],[ɡǃ],[ŋǃ].
^1^2 These symbols are officially written with a tie linking them (e.g.d͡ʒ & t͡ʃ), and are also sometimes written as single characters (e.g.ʤ & ʧ) though the latter convention is no longer official. They are written without ligatures here to ensure correct display in all browsers.
ਭੇਦਸੂਚਕ ਚਿੰਨ੍ਹ
All diacritics are here shown on a carrier letter such as the vowel a.
Careful! The Pinyin Romanization used for Mandarin has these same diacritics, but with different values. However, Thai Romanization uses them the way the IPA does.
Syllable break. (this is often redundant and therefore left off)
ਕਮਾਨੀਆਂ
Two types of brackets are commonly used to enclose transcriptions in the IPA:
/Slashes/ indicate those meaningful sounds in a pronunciation that are most prominently and broadly distinguished as the basic sounds of a language by its own native speakers; these are called phonemes. Changing the symbols between slashes would either change the identity of the word or produce nonsense. Since there is no meaningful difference to a native speaker between the two letter ‹l› sounds in the word lulls, they are considered the same phoneme and so, using slashes, they are given the same symbol in IPA: /ˈlʌlz/. Similarly, Spanish la bomba is transcribed phonemically with two instances of the same single b sound, /laˈbomba/. Thus a reader who is not familiar with the language in question might not know how to interpret these transcriptions more narrowly.
[Square brackets] indicate the narrower or more detailed phonetic qualities of a pronunciation, not taking into account the norms of the language to which it belongs; therefore, such transcriptions do not regard whether subtly different sounds in the pronunciation are actually noticeable or distinguishable to a native speaker of the language. Within square brackets is what a foreigner who does not know the structure of a language might hear as discrete units of sound. For instance, the English word lulls may be pronounced in a particular dialect more specifically as [ˈlɐɫz], with different letter ‹l› sounds at the beginning and end. This may be obvious to speakers of other languages that differentiate between the sounds [l] and [ɫ], though a native English speaker will likely not hear the two as different (since in English they are both regarded as phonetic variations—allophones—of the same /l/ phoneme). Likewise, Spanish la bomba has two unique ‹b› sounds to the ears of foreigners or linguists—[laˈβomba]—though a native Spanish speaker might not be able to hear it. Omitting or adding such detail does not make any difference to the identity of the word, but helps to give a more precise pronunciation, usually regarding a specific dialect of a language.
A third kind of bracket is occasionally seen:
Either //double slashes// or |pipes| (or occasionally other conventions) show that the enclosed sounds are theoretical constructs that are not actually heard. (This is part of morphophonology.) For instance, most phonologists argue that the -s at the ends of verbs, which surfaces as either /s/ in talks/tɔːks/ or as /z/ in lulls/lʌlz/, has a single underlying form. If they decide this form is an s, they would write it //s// (or |s|) to claim that phonemic /tɔːks/ and /lʌlz/ are essentially //tɔːks// and //lʌls// underneath. If they were to decide it was essentially the latter, //z//, they would transcribe these words //tɔːkz// and //lʌlz//.
Lastly,
⟨Angle brackets⟩ may be used to represent the orthographic representation: ⟨lulls⟩, ⟨la bomba⟩, though these are not supported on all computers. To get around this technical limitation, ‹chevrons› are also used; in addition, because they're easier to type, the less-than and greater-than signs (< >) that appear on most keyboards are commonly used for this purpose.[1]
Voiced velar plosive
These two characters should look similar:
ɡ
If in the box to the left you see the symbol rather than a lower-case open-tail g, you may be experiencing a well-known bug in the font MS Reference Sans Serif or other; switching to Lucida Sans Unicode or Arial Unicode should fix it.
The tie bar is intended to cover both letters of an affricate or doubly articulated consonant. However, if your browser uses Arial Unicode MS to display IPA characters, the following incorrectly formed sequences may look better than the correct order (letter, tie bar, letter) due to a bug in that font:
ts͡, tʃ͡, tɕ͡, dz͡, dʒ͡, dʑ͡, tɬ͡, kp͡, ɡb͡, ŋm͡.
Here is how the proper configuration displays in your default font:
True angle brackets, ⟨ ⟩, are unsupported by several common fonts, and so have been replaced by ‹ › or < > in most Wikipedia articles. However,
↑Because < > are used in html, they may trigger an html element. For example, <i> on a web page would not show up as such but would instead italicize text that followed. This can be avoided by writing < or < or <nowiki><</nowiki> instead of <.
