Help:IPA/Introduction

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Introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for English Wikipedians. The purpose of this introduction is to orient English speakers to IPA' basic principles, to gain a basic foothold in reading and using IPA. Note that simply transliterating the English alphaphonetic vowels to Latin digraphs, ie. A=/ei/, E=/i:/, I=/ai/, O=/ou/, and U= /ju/ (or /iu/) overcomes what is perhaps the main obstacle to learning and using IPA.

Vowels: While English uses 6 vowels to represent about 13 vowel sounds, in IPA each of these different vowel sounds are represented by a distinct letter (see vowels audio chart for samples). IPA does not use common English digraphs such as "aa" "ee" "ii" "oo" and "uu," nor imported digraphs such as "au" "ei" "ou" which are pronounced sometimes according to French or German conventions (see notes).
Consonants': IPA Consonants are 80-90% intuitive to English consonants, and using English consonants will often be accurate. There are some basic caveats which are explained below, but IPA learners will find that these are often easily corrected by fluent IPA users.

Vowels

The first principle is to not use English alphaphonemic. Words like the below are pronounced as in English alphabet only, as we are trained to recite it, but in accord with a system not found anywhere else:

A: rake, ape, angel, bane, rain,
E: repo, return, eke, retake, deface, (see notes)
I: rice, right, ripe,
O: (see notes)
U: use, u-turn, utopia,

Most of these sounds are actually two vowel sounds combined: A is /ei/, E is /i/, I is /ai/, O is /ou/, U is /iu/ (or /ju/ --IPA uses j for its Y consonant, as in "you" [ju]). While writing IPA, you can write English alphaphonemic vowels as capitals: [rAk], [rEturn], [

E: Note English commonly requires an "ea" or an "ee" for an /i/ sound:ie. "read," "reed." The /i/ sound found in words with re- and de- prefixes is an English convention that emphasises their meaning. The common Latin-IPA /i/ is perhaps the hardest to learn. O: Note that IPA /o/ is shorter than the common English "o", written /ou/. Using vowel sounds common to most languages,

these words are spelled:

A: /ei/. rake ~ [reik] (not /ai/ as in Germanic reich),
E: /i/. repo ~ [ripo]
I: /ai/. rice/rais/ (not /ei/ as in "raise" [reiz])
O: /ou/. rope ~ [roup] (not /u/ as in French coup, or /au/ as in out [aut] and rout [raut])
U: /iu/. use ~ [juz] (not /uz/ as in "Jews")

Consonants

While most English consonants are intuitive to IPA, there are some notable caveats, some of which are counterintuitive and obstructing to new IPA learners. While not technically correct, often just using intuitive English consonants is sufficient, for example using "r" instead of ɹ is often sufficent.

Y the consonant is /j/, as in [jes] ("yes"), [jeloʊ] ("yellow").
- The IPA /y/ is for a non-English vowel sound (the close front rounded vowel).