International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a system of phonetic notation designed to represent the sounds of all spoken languages. It is composed of around 107 base symbols and 55 modifiers, grouped in three categories: letters, diacritics, and suprasegmentals (which indicate tone and inflection). The idea of the IPA was launched in 1886 when the International Phonetic Association was created by a group of French and British language teachers, and the first version of the alphabet was released in 1888. The alphabet has undergone some revisions and changes through the years; we list here the 2005 version of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is graciously allowed for copying by the International Phonetic Association.

International Phonetic Alphabet

International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet is a system of phonetic notation designed to represent the sounds of all spoken languages. It is composed of around 107 base symbols and 55 modifiers, grouped in three categories: letters, diacritics, and suprasegmentals (which indicate tone and inflection). These categories are further divided into other sections, with letters divided into vowels and consonants, and diacritics and suprasegmentals divided as to articulation, phonation, tone, intonation, or stress.

The idea of the IPA was launched in 1886 when the International Phonetic Association was created by a group of French and British language teachers, and the first version of the alphabet was released in 1888. The alphabet has undergone some revisions and changes through the years; we list here the 2005 version of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is graciously allowed for copying by the International Phonetic Association (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54124, Greece).

Fonts for the International Phonetic Alphabet can be found on these pages:

International Phonetic Association: Fonts
IPA Transcription with SIL Fonts
IPA transcription in Unicode
IPA-SAM phonetic fonts

We list here sections of the IPA chart broken down into categories with large images; below is full page listing of the International Phonetic Alphabet on one page; and here one may download a PDF copy of the full page of the IPA chart.