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: French, Standard German and Spanish. For symbols not covered by those, recourse is taken to the populous languages Standard Chinese, Hindustani, Arabic and Russian. For sounds still not covered, other well-analyzed languages are used, such as Swahili, Zulu and Turkish.
The left-hand column displays the individual symbols in square brackets ([a]ⓘ). Click on "listen" to hear the sound; click on the symbol itself for a dedicated article with a more complete description and examples from multiple languages. Consonant sounds are spoken once followed by a vowel and once between vowels.
If the characters do not display, you may need to install a supporting font. Free fonts with good IPA support include Gentium Plus (serif) and Andika (sans-serif).
Main symbols
The symbols are arranged by similarity to letters of the Latin alphabet. Symbols which do not resemble any Latin letter are placed at the end, the others section.
Two types of brackets are commonly used to enclose transcriptions in the IPA:
/Slashes/ indicate sounds that are distinguished as the basic units of words in a language by native speakers; these are called phonemes. Changing the symbols between these slashes would either change the identity of the word or produce nonsense. For example, since there is no meaningful difference to a native speaker between the two sounds written with the letter L 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 bamba is transcribed phonemically with two instances of the same b sound, /laˈbamba/, despite the fact that they sound different to a speaker of English. 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 L sounds at the beginning and end. This may be obvious to speakers of languages that differentiate between the sounds [l] and [ɫ]. Likewise, Spanish la bamba (pronounced without a pause) has two different B sounds to the ears of foreigners or linguists—[laˈβamba]—though a native Spanish speaker might not be able to hear it. Omitting or adding such detail does not make a difference to the identity of the word, but helps to give a more precise pronunciation.
⫽Double slashes⫽ indicate diaphonemes. For example, some speakers pronounce dune as /djuːn/ with a distinct /j/, others /duːn/ as if spelled doon, and even others /dʒuːn/ like June. This is predictable where the historical pronunciation is /dj/ preceded by /uː/—the second group of speakers invariably drop the /j/, and the third group invariably turn it into /dʒ/—and it can be cumbersome to write down all three possibilities every time such a sequence is found. So the diaphonemic notation ⫽dj⫽ serves as a shorthand for "/dj/ for traditional speakers, /d/ for those who drop /j/ between historical /d/ and /uː/, and /dʒ/ for those who turn it into /dʒ/ in such a context".
A fourth kind of bracket is occasionally seen:
|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| 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⟩ are used to set off orthography, as well as transliteration from non-Latin scripts. Thus ⟨lulls⟩, ⟨la bamba⟩, the letter ⟨a⟩. Angle brackets are not supported by all fonts, so a template {{angle bracket}} (shortcut {{angbr}}) is used to ensure maximal compatibility. (Comment there if you are having problems.)
Rendering issues
IPA typeface support is increasing, and is now included in several typefaces such as the Times New Roman versions that come with various recent computer operating systems. Diacritics are not always properly rendered, however. IPA typefaces that are freely available online include Gentium, several from the SIL (such as Charis SIL, and Doulos SIL), Dehuti, DejaVu Sans, and TITUS Cyberbit, which are all freely available; as well as commercial typefaces such as Brill, available from Brill Publishers, and Lucida Sans Unicode and Arial Unicode MS, shipping with various Microsoft products. These all include several ranges of characters in addition to the IPA. Modern Web browsers generally do not need any configuration to display these symbols, provided that a typeface capable of doing so is available to the operating system.
Particularly, the following symbols may be shown improperly depending on your font:
Registered users can specify their own font for IPA text by editing their user stylesheet. They can also edit their global stylesheet, which works across all Wikimedia projects. For instance, the following code would cause IPA to be displayed in the font Charis SIL:
.IPA{font-family:"Charis SIL";}
Computer input using on-screen keyboard
Online IPA keyboard utilities are available and they cover a range of IPA symbols and diacritics:
IPA i-charts (2018)
IPA character picker
TypeIt.org
IPA Chart Keyboard
For iOS there are free IPA keyboard layouts, e.g. IPA Phonetic Keyboard.
