International Phonetic Alphabet

International Phonetic Alphabet, also called IPA, is an international alphabet used by linguists to accurately represent the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) in human speech. A phoneme is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. For example, the English words “sit”, “bit”, and “kit” can be distinguished by the sounds, or phonemes, that are created by each of their first letters.

A phoneme chart is a table that displays the IPA symbol for each of the IPA phonemes of the international alphabet. A phoneme chart can be organized in different ways based on the characteristics of the different IPA phonemes and the relationships between them. For example, in the IPA vowel chart at the bottom of this page, the IPA phonemes that are generated in the same part of the mouth are listed in the same column, and those that are generated with the same amount of mouth opening or closing are listed in the same row. In addition, the IPA vowel chart and other interactive IPA charts below include audio recordings of the individual phonemes in order to help students, non-native speakers of the language, and others, to learn IPA pronunciation of particular sounds.

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